SLIM: Spuriousness Mitigation with Minimal Human Annotations

Recent studies highlight that deep learning models often learn spurious features mistakenly linked to labels, compromising their reliability in real-world scenarios where such correlations do not hold. Despite the increasing research effort, existing solutions often face two main challenges: they either demand substantial annotations of spurious attributes, or they yield less competitive outcomes with expensive training when additional annotations are absent. In this paper, we introduce SLIM, a cost-effective and performance-targeted approach to reducing spurious correlations in deep learning. Our method leverages a human-in-the-loop protocol featuring a novel attention labeling mechanism with a constructed attention representation space. SLIM significantly reduces the need for exhaustive additional labeling, requiring human input for fewer than 3% of instances. By prioritizing data quality over complicated training strategies, SLIM curates a smaller yet more feature-balanced data subset, fostering the development of spuriousness-robust models. Experimental validations across key benchmarks demonstrate that SLIM competes with or exceeds the performance of leading methods while significantly reducing costs. The SLIM framework thus presents a promising path for developing reliable models more efficiently. Our code is available in https://github.com/xiweix/SLIM.git/.

CAD-DA: Controllable Anomaly Detection after Domain Adaptation by Statistical Inference

We propose a novel statistical method for testing the results of anomaly detection (AD) under domain adaptation (DA), which we call CAD-DA -- controllable AD under DA. The distinct advantage of the CAD-DA lies in its ability to control the probability of misidentifying anomalies under a pre-specified level $\alpha$ (e.g., 0.05). The challenge within this DA setting is the necessity to account for the influence of DA to ensure the validity of the inference results. Our solution to this challenge leverages the concept of conditional Selective Inference to handle the impact of DA. To our knowledge, this is the first work capable of conducting a valid statistical inference within the context of DA. We evaluate the performance of the CAD-DA method on both synthetic and real-world datasets.

From SMOTE to Mixup for Deep Imbalanced Classification

Given imbalanced data, it is hard to train a good classifier using deep learning because of the poor generalization of minority classes. Traditionally, the well-known synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTE) for data augmentation, a data mining approach for imbalanced learning, has been used to improve this generalization. However, it is unclear whether SMOTE also benefits deep learning. In this work, we study why the original SMOTE is insufficient for deep learning, and enhance SMOTE using soft labels. Connecting the resulting soft SMOTE with Mixup, a modern data augmentation technique, leads to a unified framework that puts traditional and modern data augmentation techniques under the same umbrella. A careful study within this framework shows that Mixup improves generalization by implicitly achieving uneven margins between majority and minority classes. We then propose a novel margin-aware Mixup technique that more explicitly achieves uneven margins. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed technique yields state-of-the-art performance on deep imbalanced classification while achieving superior performance on extremely imbalanced data. The code is open-sourced in our developed package https://github.com/ntucllab/imbalanced-DL to foster future research in this direction.

Score-based Conditional Generation with Fewer Labeled Data by Self-calibrating Classifier Guidance

Score-based Generative Models (SGMs) are a popular family of deep generative models that achieves leading image generation quality. Earlier studies have extended SGMs to tackle class-conditional generation by coupling an unconditional SGM with the guidance of a trained classifier. Nevertheless, such classifier-guided SGMs do not always achieve accurate conditional generation, especially when trained with fewer labeled data. We argue that the issue is rooted in unreliable gradients of the classifier and the inability to fully utilize unlabeled data during training. We then propose to improve classifier-guided SGMs by letting the classifier calibrate itself. Our key idea is to use principles from energy-based models to convert the classifier as another view of the unconditional SGM. Then, existing loss for the unconditional SGM can be adopted to calibrate the classifier using both labeled and unlabeled data. Empirical results validate that the proposed approach significantly improves the conditional generation quality across different percentages of labeled data. The improved performance makes the proposed approach consistently superior to other conditional SGMs when using fewer labeled data. The results confirm the potential of the proposed approach for generative modeling with limited labeled data.

Re-Benchmarking Pool-Based Active Learning for Binary Classification

Active learning is a paradigm that significantly enhances the performance of machine learning models when acquiring labeled data is expensive. While several benchmarks exist for evaluating active learning strategies, their findings exhibit some misalignment. This discrepancy motivates us to develop a transparent and reproducible benchmark for the community. Our efforts result in an open-sourced implementation (https://github.com/ariapoy/active-learning-benchmark) that is reliable and extensible for future research. By conducting thorough re-benchmarking experiments, we have not only rectified misconfigurations in existing benchmark but also shed light on the under-explored issue of model compatibility, which directly causes the observed discrepancy. Resolving the discrepancy reassures that the uncertainty sampling strategy of active learning remains an effective and preferred choice for most datasets. Our experience highlights the importance of dedicating research efforts towards re-benchmarking existing benchmarks to produce more credible results and gain deeper insights.

Understanding and Mitigating Spurious Correlations in Text Classification

Recent work has shown that deep learning models are prone to exploit spurious correlations that are present in the training set, yet may not hold true in general. A sentiment classifier may erroneously learn that the token spielberg is always tied to positive movie reviews. Relying on spurious correlations may lead to significant degradation in generalizability and should be avoided. In this paper, we propose a neighborhood analysis framework to explain how exactly language models exploit spurious correlations. Driven by the analysis, we propose a family of regularization methods, NFL (do Not Forget your Language) to prevent the situation. Experiments on two text classification tasks show that NFL brings a significant improvement over standard fine-tuning in terms of robustness without sacrificing in-distribution accuracy.

CLCIFAR: CIFAR-Derived Benchmark Datasets with Human Annotated Complementary Labels

As a weakly-supervised learning paradigm, complementary label learning (CLL) aims to learn a multi-class classifier from only complementary labels, classes to which an instance does not belong. Despite various studies have addressed how to learn from CLL, those methods typically rely on some distributional assumptions on the complementary labels, and are benchmarked only on some synthetic datasets. It remains unclear how the noise or bias arising from the human annotation process would affect those CLL algorithms. To fill the gap, we design a protocol to collect complementary labels annotated by human. Two datasets, CLCIFAR10 and CLCIFAR20, based on CIFAR10 and CIFAR100, respectively, are collected. We analyzed the empirical transition matrices of the collected datasets, and observed that they are noisy and biased. We then performed extensive benchmark experiments on the collected datasets with various CLL algorithms to validate whether the existing algorithms can learn from the real-world complementary datasets. The dataset can be accessed with the following link: https://github.com/ntucllab/complementary_cifar.

Enhancing Label Sharing Efficiency in Complementary-Label Learning with Label Augmentation

Complementary-label Learning (CLL) is a form of weakly supervised learning that trains an ordinary classifier using only complementary labels, which are the classes that certain instances do not belong to. While existing CLL studies typically use novel loss functions or training techniques to solve this problem, few studies focus on how complementary labels collectively provide information to train the ordinary classifier. In this paper, we fill the gap by analyzing the implicit sharing of complementary labels on nearby instances during training. Our analysis reveals that the efficiency of implicit label sharing is closely related to the performance of existing CLL models. Based on this analysis, we propose a novel technique that enhances the sharing efficiency via complementary-label augmentation, which explicitly propagates additional complementary labels to each instance. We carefully design the augmentation process to enrich the data with new and accurate complementary labels, which provide CLL models with fresh and valuable information to enhance the sharing efficiency. We then verify our proposed technique by conducting thorough experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets. Our results confirm that complementary-label augmentation can systematically improve empirical performance over state-of-the-art CLL models.

SUNY: A Visual Interpretation Framework for Convolutional Neural Networks from a Necessary and Sufficient Perspective

Researchers have proposed various methods for visually interpreting the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) via saliency maps, which include Class-Activation-Map (CAM) based approaches as a leading family. However, in terms of the internal design logic, existing CAM-based approaches often overlook the causal perspective that answers the core "why" question to help humans understand the explanation. Additionally, current CNN explanations lack the consideration of both necessity and sufficiency, two complementary sides of a desirable explanation. This paper presents a causality-driven framework, SUNY, designed to rationalize the explanations toward better human understanding. Using the CNN model's input features or internal filters as hypothetical causes, SUNY generates explanations by bi-directional quantifications on both the necessary and sufficient perspectives. Extensive evaluations justify that SUNY not only produces more informative and convincing explanations from the angles of necessity and sufficiency, but also achieves performances competitive to other approaches across different CNN architectures over large-scale datasets, including ILSVRC2012 and CUB-200-2011.

Semi-Supervised Domain Adaptation with Source Label Adaptation

Semi-Supervised Domain Adaptation (SSDA) involves learning to classify unseen target data with a few labeled and lots of unlabeled target data, along with many labeled source data from a related domain. Current SSDA approaches usually aim at aligning the target data to the labeled source data with feature space mapping and pseudo-label assignments. Nevertheless, such a source-oriented model can sometimes align the target data to source data of the wrong classes, degrading the classification performance. This paper presents a novel source-adaptive paradigm that adapts the source data to match the target data. Our key idea is to view the source data as a noisily-labeled version of the ideal target data. Then, we propose an SSDA model that cleans up the label noise dynamically with the help of a robust cleaner component designed from the target perspective. Since the paradigm is very different from the core ideas behind existing SSDA approaches, our proposed model can be easily coupled with them to improve their performance. Empirical results on two state-of-the-art SSDA approaches demonstrate that the proposed model effectively cleans up the noise within the source labels and exhibits superior performance over those approaches across benchmark datasets.