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Poster
in
Workshop: Spurious correlations, Invariance, and Stability (SCIS)

Causal Balancing for Domain Generalization

Xinyi Wang · Michael Saxon · Jiachen Li · Hongyang Zhang · Kun Zhang · William Wang

Keywords: [ latent variable model ] [ domain generalization ] [ Causality ] [ spurious correlation ]


Abstract:

While machine learning models rapidly advance the state-of-the-art on various real-world tasks, out-of-domain (OOD) generalization remains a challenging problem given the vulnerability of these models to spurious correlations. We propose a balanced mini-batch sampling strategy to reduce the domain-specific spurious correlations in the observed training distributions. More specifically, we propose a two-phased method that 1) identifies the source of spurious correlations, and 2) builds balanced mini-batches free from spurious correlations by matching on the identified source. We provide an identifiability guarantee of the source of spuriousness and show that our proposed approach samples from a balanced, spurious-free distribution under ideal scenario. Experiments are conducted on three domain generalization datasets, demonstrating empirically that our balanced mini-batch sampling strategy improves the performance of four different established domain generalization model baselines compared to the random mini-batch sampling strategy.

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