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Poster
Sparse Invariant Risk Minimization
Xiao Zhou · Yong LIN · Weizhong Zhang · Tong Zhang

Tue Jul 19 03:30 PM -- 05:30 PM (PDT) @ Hall E #522
in Poster Session 1 »

Invariant Risk Minimization (IRM) is an emerging invariant feature extracting technique to help generalization with distributional shift. However, we find that there exists a basic and intractable contradiction between the model trainability and generalization ability in IRM. On one hand, recent studies on deep learning theory indicate the importance of large-sized or even overparameterized neural networks to make the model easy to train. On the other hand, unlike empirical risk minimization that can be benefited from overparameterization, our empirical and theoretical analyses show that the generalization ability of IRM is much easier to be demolished by overfitting caused by overparameterization. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective paradigm named Sparse Invariant Risk Minimization (SparseIRM) to address this contradiction. Our key idea is to employ a global sparsity constraint as a defense to prevent spurious features from leaking in during the whole IRM process. Compared with sparisfy-after-training prototype by prior work which can discard invariant features, the global sparsity constraint limits the budget for feature selection and enforces SparseIRM to select the invariant features. We illustrate the benefit of SparseIRM through a theoretical analysis on a simple linear case. Empirically we demonstrate the power of SparseIRM through various datasets and models and surpass state-of-the-art methods with a gap up to 29\%.

Keywords: MISC: Representation Learning · MISC: Transfer, Multitask and Meta-learning

Author Information

Xiao Zhou (HKUST)
Yong LIN (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)
Weizhong Zhang (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)
Tong Zhang (HKUST)
Tong Zhang

Tong Zhang is a professor of Computer Science and Mathematics at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His research interests are machine learning, big data and their applications. He obtained a BA in Mathematics and Computer Science from Cornell University, and a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University. Before joining HKUST, Tong Zhang was a professor at Rutgers University, and worked previously at IBM, Yahoo as research scientists, Baidu as the director of Big Data Lab, and Tencent as the founding director of AI Lab. Tong Zhang was an ASA fellow and IMS fellow, and has served as the chair or area-chair in major machine learning conferences such as NIPS, ICML, and COLT, and has served as associate editors in top machine learning journals such as PAMI, JMLR, and Machine Learning Journal.

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