Shifts 2.0: Extending The Dataset of Real Distributional Shifts

Distributional shift, or the mismatch between training and deployment data, is a significant obstacle to the usage of machine learning in high-stakes industrial applications, such as autonomous driving and medicine. This creates a need to be able to assess how robustly ML models generalize as well as the quality of their uncertainty estimates. Standard ML baseline datasets do not allow these properties to be assessed, as the training, validation and test data are often identically distributed. Recently, a range of dedicated benchmarks have appeared, featuring both distributionally matched and shifted data. Among these benchmarks, the Shifts dataset stands out in terms of the diversity of tasks as well as the data modalities it features. While most of the benchmarks are heavily dominated by 2D image classification tasks, Shifts contains tabular weather forecasting, machine translation, and vehicle motion prediction tasks. This enables the robustness properties of models to be assessed on a diverse set of industrial-scale tasks and either universal or directly applicable task-specific conclusions to be reached. In this paper, we extend the Shifts Dataset with two datasets sourced from industrial, high-risk applications of high societal importance. Specifically, we consider the tasks of segmentation of white matter Multiple Sclerosis lesions in 3D magnetic resonance brain images and the estimation of power consumption in marine cargo vessels. Both tasks feature ubiquitous distributional shifts and a strict safety requirement due to the high cost of errors. These new datasets will allow researchers to further explore robust generalization and uncertainty estimation in new situations. In this work, we provide a description of the dataset and baseline results for both tasks.

MAIN: Multihead-Attention Imputation Networks

The problem of missing data, usually absent incurated and competition-standard datasets, is an unfortunate reality for most machine learning models used in industry applications. Recent work has focused on understanding the nature and the negative effects of such phenomena, while devising solutions for optimal imputation of the missing data, using both discriminative and generative approaches. We propose a novel mechanism based on multi-head attention which can be applied effortlessly in any model and achieves better downstream performance without the introduction of the full dataset in any part of the modeling pipeline. Our method inductively models patterns of missingness in the input data in order to increase the performance of the downstream task. Finally, after evaluating our method against baselines for a number of datasets, we found performance gains that tend to be larger in scenarios of high missingness.