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Last Layer Re-Training is Sufficient for Robustness to Spurious Correlations

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arxiv 2204.02937 v2 pith:3G4PXEQF submitted 2022-04-06 cs.LG cs.CVstat.ML

Polina Kirichenko , Pavel Izmailov , Andrew Gordon Wilson This is my paper
classification cs.LGcs.CVstat.ML
keywords lastlayerspuriousfeaturesretrainingrobustnesssimpleapproaches
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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Neural network classifiers can largely rely on simple spurious features, such as backgrounds, to make predictions. However, even in these cases, we show that they still often learn core features associated with the desired attributes of the data, contrary to recent findings. Inspired by this insight, we demonstrate that simple last layer retraining can match or outperform state-of-the-art approaches on spurious correlation benchmarks, but with profoundly lower complexity and computational expenses. Moreover, we show that last layer retraining on large ImageNet-trained models can also significantly reduce reliance on background and texture information, improving robustness to covariate shift, after only minutes of training on a single GPU.

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Cited by 7 Pith papers

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