The Robustness Limits of SoTA Vision Models to Natural Variation

Published: 02 Jun 2023, Last Modified: 17 Sept 2024Accepted by TMLREveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY 4.0
Abstract: Recent state-of-the-art vision models have introduced new architectures, learning paradigms, and larger pretraining data, leading to impressive performance on tasks such as classification. While previous generations of vision models were shown to lack robustness to factors such as pose, the extent to which this next generation of models are more robust remains unclear. To study this question, we develop a dataset of more than 7 million images with controlled changes in pose, position background, lighting color, and size. We study not only how robust recent state-of- the-art models are, but also the extent to which models can generalize to variation in each of these factors. We consider a catalog of recent vision models, including vision transformers (ViT), self-supervised models such as masked autoencoders (MAE), and models trained on larger datasets such as CLIP. We find that even today’s best models are not robust to common changes in pose, size, and background. When some samples varied during training, we found models required a significant portion of instances seen varying to generalize—though eventually robustness did improve. When variability is only witnessed for some classes however, we found that models did not generalize to other classes unless the classes were very similar to those seen varying during training. We hope our work will shed further light on the blind spots of SoTA models and spur the development of more robust vision models.
Submission Length: Regular submission (no more than 12 pages of main content)
Supplementary Material: zip
Assigned Action Editor: ~Dumitru_Erhan1
License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Submission Number: 707
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