Trained Models Tell Us How to Make Them Robust to Spurious Correlation without Group Annotation

Classifiers trained with Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) tend to rely on attributes that have high spurious correlation with the target. This can degrade the performance on underrepresented (or 'minority') groups that lack these attributes, posing significant challenges for both out-of-distribution generalization and fairness objectives. Many studies aim to enhance robustness to spurious correlation, but they sometimes depend on group annotations for training. Additionally, a common limitation in previous research is the reliance on group-annotated validation datasets for model selection. This constrains their applicability in situations where the nature of the spurious correlation is not known, or when group labels for certain spurious attributes are not available. To enhance model robustness with minimal group annotation assumptions, we propose Environment-based Validation and Loss-based Sampling (EVaLS). It uses the losses from an ERM-trained model to construct a balanced dataset of high-loss and low-loss samples, mitigating group imbalance in data. This significantly enhances robustness to group shifts when equipped with a simple post-training last layer retraining. By using environment inference methods to create diverse environments with correlation shifts, EVaLS can potentially eliminate the need for group annotation in validation data. In this context, the worst environment accuracy acts as a reliable surrogate throughout the retraining process for tuning hyperparameters and finding a model that performs well across diverse group shifts. EVaLS effectively achieves group robustness, showing that group annotation is not necessary even for validation. It is a fast, straightforward, and effective approach that reaches near-optimal worst group accuracy without needing group annotations, marking a new chapter in the robustness of trained models against spurious correlation.

Annotation-Free Group Robustness via Loss-Based Resampling

It is well-known that training neural networks for image classification with empirical risk minimization (ERM) makes them vulnerable to relying on spurious attributes instead of causal ones for prediction. Previously, deep feature re-weighting (DFR) has proposed retraining the last layer of a pre-trained network on balanced data concerning spurious attributes, making it robust to spurious correlation. However, spurious attribute annotations are not always available. In order to provide group robustness without such annotations, we propose a new method, called loss-based feature re-weighting (LFR), in which we infer a grouping of the data by evaluating an ERM-pre-trained model on a small left-out split of the training data. Then, a balanced number of samples is chosen by selecting high-loss samples from misclassified data points and low-loss samples from correctly-classified ones. Finally, we retrain the last layer on the selected balanced groups to make the model robust to spurious correlation. For a complete assessment, we evaluate LFR on various versions of Waterbirds and CelebA datasets with different spurious correlations, which is a novel technique for observing the model's performance in a wide range of spuriosity rates. While LFR is extremely fast and straightforward, it outperforms the previous methods that do not assume group label availability, as well as the DFR with group annotations provided, in cases of high spurious correlation in the training data.