Timezone: »

 
Poster
Predict then Interpolate: A Simple Algorithm to Learn Stable Classifiers
Yujia Bao · Shiyu Chang · Regina Barzilay

Thu Jul 22 09:00 AM -- 11:00 AM (PDT) @
in Poster Session 5 »

We propose Predict then Interpolate (PI), a simple algorithm for learning correlations that are stable across environments. The algorithm follows from the intuition that when using a classifier trained on one environment to make predictions on examples from another environment, its mistakes are informative as to which correlations are unstable. In this work, we prove that by interpolating the distributions of the correct predictions and the wrong predictions, we can uncover an oracle distribution where the unstable correlation vanishes. Since the oracle interpolation coefficients are not accessible, we use group distributionally robust optimization to minimize the worst-case risk across all such interpolations. We evaluate our method on both text classification and image classification. Empirical results demonstrate that our algorithm is able to learn robust classifiers (outperforms IRM by 23.85% on synthetic environments and 12.41% on natural environments). Our code and data are available at https://github.com/YujiaBao/ Predict-then-Interpolate.

Keywords: Algorithms · Multitask, Transfer, and Meta Learning

Author Information

Yujia Bao (MIT)
Shiyu Chang (UCSB)
Regina Barzilay (MIT CSAIL)
Regina Barzilay

Regina Barzilay is an Israeli-American computer scientist. She is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a faculty lead for artificial intelligence at the MIT Jameel Clinic. Her research interests are in natural language processing and applications of deep learning to chemistry and oncology.

Related Events (a corresponding poster, oral, or spotlight)

More from the Same Authors