Deep learning models have been shown to learn spurious correlations from data that sometimes lead to systematic failures for certain subpopulations. Prior work has typically diagnosed this by crowdsourcing annotations for various protected attributes and measuring performance, which is both expensive to acquire and difficult to scale. In this work, we propose UDIS, an unsupervised algorithm for surfacing and analyzing such failure modes. UDIS identifies subpopulations via hierarchical clustering of dataset embeddings and surfaces systematic failure modes by visualizing low performing clusters along with their gradient-weighted class-activation maps. We show the effectiveness of UDIS in identifying failure modes in models trained for image classification on the CelebA and MSCOCO datasets.
Most modern approaches for domain adaptive semantic segmentation rely on continued access to source data during adaptation, which may be infeasible due to computational or privacy constraints. We focus on source-free domain adaptation for semantic segmentation, wherein a source model must adapt itself to a new target domain given only unlabeled target data. We propose Self-Supervised Selective Self-Training (S4T), a source-free adaptation algorithm that first uses the model's pixel-level predictive consistency across diverse views of each target image along with model confidence to classify pixel predictions as either reliable or unreliable. Next, the model is self-trained, using predicted pseudolabels for reliable predictions and pseudolabels inferred via a selective interpolation strategy for unreliable ones. S4T matches or improves upon the state-of-the-art in source-free adaptation on 3 standard benchmarks for semantic segmentation within a single epoch of adaptation.
As an attempt towards assessing the robustness of embodied navigation agents, we propose RobustNav, a framework to quantify the performance of embodied navigation agents when exposed to a wide variety of visual - affecting RGB inputs - and dynamics - affecting transition dynamics - corruptions. Most recent efforts in visual navigation have typically focused on generalizing to novel target environments with similar appearance and dynamics characteristics. With RobustNav, we find that some standard embodied navigation agents significantly underperform (or fail) in the presence of visual or dynamics corruptions. We systematically analyze the kind of idiosyncrasies that emerge in the behavior of such agents when operating under corruptions. Finally, for visual corruptions in RobustNav, we show that while standard techniques to improve robustness such as data-augmentation and self-supervised adaptation offer some zero-shot resistance and improvements in navigation performance, there is still a long way to go in terms of recovering lost performance relative to clean "non-corrupt" settings, warranting more research in this direction. Our code is available at https://github.com/allenai/robustnav
Many existing approaches for unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) focus on adapting under only data distribution shift and offer limited success under additional cross-domain label distribution shift. Recent work based on self-training using target pseudo-labels has shown promise, but on challenging shifts pseudo-labels may be highly unreliable, and using them for self-training may cause error accumulation and domain misalignment. We propose Selective Entropy Optimization via Committee Consistency (SENTRY), a UDA algorithm that judges the reliability of a target instance based on its predictive consistency under a committee of random image transformations. Our algorithm then selectively minimizes predictive entropy to increase confidence on highly consistent target instances, while maximizing predictive entropy to reduce confidence on highly inconsistent ones. In combination with pseudo-label based approximate target class balancing, our approach leads to significant improvements over the state-of-the-art on 27/31 domain shifts from standard UDA benchmarks as well as benchmarks designed to stress-test adaptation under label distribution shift.
Training temporal action detection in videos requires large amounts of labeled data, yet such annotation is expensive to collect. Incorporating unlabeled or weakly-labeled data to train action detection model could help reduce annotation cost. In this work, we first introduce the Semi-supervised Action Detection (SSAD) task with a mixture of labeled and unlabeled data and analyze different types of errors in the proposed SSAD baselines which are directly adapted from the semi-supervised classification task. To alleviate the main error of action incompleteness (i.e., missing parts of actions) in SSAD baselines, we further design an unsupervised foreground attention (UFA) module utilizing the "independence" between foreground and background motion. Then we incorporate weakly-labeled data into SSAD and propose Omni-supervised Action Detection (OSAD) with three levels of supervision. An information bottleneck (IB) suppressing the scene information in non-action frames while preserving the action information is designed to help overcome the accompanying action-context confusion problem in OSAD baselines. We extensively benchmark against the baselines for SSAD and OSAD on our created data splits in THUMOS14 and ActivityNet1.2, and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed UFA and IB methods. Lastly, the benefit of our full OSAD-IB model under limited annotation budgets is shown by exploring the optimal annotation strategy for labeled, unlabeled and weakly-labeled data.
Generalizing deep neural networks to new target domains is critical to their real-world utility. In practice, it may be feasible to get some target data labeled, but to be cost-effective it is desirable to select a maximally-informative subset via active learning (AL). We study this problem of AL under a domain shift. We empirically demonstrate how existing AL approaches based solely on model uncertainty or representative sampling are suboptimal for active domain adaptation. Our algorithm, Active Domain Adaptation via CLustering Uncertainty-weighted Embeddings (ADA-CLUE), i) identifies diverse datapoints for labeling that are both uncertain under the model and representative of unlabeled target data, and ii) leverages the available source and target data for adaptation by optimizing a semi-supervised adversarial entropy loss that is complementary to our active sampling objective. On standard image classification benchmarks for domain adaptation, ADA-CLUE consistently performs as well or better than competing active adaptation, active learning, and domain adaptation methods across shift severities, model initializations, and labeling budgets.
Supervised learning requires a large amount of training data, limiting its application where labeled data is scarce. To compensate for data scarcity, one possible method is to utilize auxiliary tasks to provide additional supervision for the main task. Assigning and optimizing the importance weights for different auxiliary tasks remains an crucial and largely understudied research question. In this work, we propose a method to automatically reweight auxiliary tasks in order to reduce the data requirement on the main task. Specifically, we formulate the weighted likelihood function of auxiliary tasks as a surrogate prior for the main task. By adjusting the auxiliary task weights to minimize the divergence between the surrogate prior and the true prior of the main task, we obtain a more accurate prior estimation, achieving the goal of minimizing the required amount of training data for the main task and avoiding a costly grid search. In multiple experimental settings (e.g. semi-supervised learning, multi-label classification), we demonstrate that our algorithm can effectively utilize limited labeled data of the main task with the benefit of auxiliary tasks compared with previous task reweighting methods. We also show that under extreme cases with only a few extra examples (e.g. few-shot domain adaptation), our algorithm results in significant improvement over the baseline.
Recent work has presented embodied agents that can navigate to point-goal targets in novel indoor environments with near-perfect accuracy. However, these agents are equipped with idealized sensors for localization and take deterministic actions. This setting is practically sterile by comparison to the dirty reality of noisy sensors and actuations in the real world -- wheels can slip, motion sensors have error, actuations can rebound. In this work, we take a step towards this noisy reality, developing point-goal navigation agents that rely on visual estimates of egomotion under noisy action dynamics. We find these agents outperform naive adaptions of current point-goal agents to this setting as well as those incorporating classic localization baselines. Further, our model conceptually divides learning agent dynamics or odometry (where am I?) from task-specific navigation policy (where do I want to go?). This enables a seamless adaption to changing dynamics (a different robot or floor type) by simply re-calibrating the visual odometry model -- circumventing the expense of re-training of the navigation policy. Our agent was the runner-up in the PointNav track of CVPR 2020 Habitat Challenge.
We introduce TIDE, a framework and associated toolbox for analyzing the sources of error in object detection and instance segmentation algorithms. Importantly, our framework is applicable across datasets and can be applied directly to output prediction files without required knowledge of the underlying prediction system. Thus, our framework can be used as a drop-in replacement for the standard mAP computation while providing a comprehensive analysis of each model's strengths and weaknesses. We segment errors into six types and, crucially, are the first to introduce a technique for measuring the contribution of each error in a way that isolates its effect on overall performance. We show that such a representation is critical for drawing accurate, comprehensive conclusions through in-depth analysis across 4 datasets and 7 recognition models. Available at https://dbolya.github.io/tide/
We introduce Domain-specific Masks for Generalization, a model for improving both in-domain and out-of-domain generalization performance. For domain generalization, the goal is to learn from a set of source domains to produce a single model that will best generalize to an unseen target domain. As such, many prior approaches focus on learning representations which persist across all source domains with the assumption that these domain agnostic representations will generalize well. However, often individual domains contain characteristics which are unique and when leveraged can significantly aid in-domain recognition performance. To produce a model which best generalizes to both seen and unseen domains, we propose learning domain specific masks. The masks are encouraged to learn a balance of domain-invariant and domain-specific features, thus enabling a model which can benefit from the predictive power of specialized features while retaining the universal applicability of domain-invariant features. We demonstrate competitive performance compared to naive baselines and state-of-the-art methods on both PACS and DomainNet.