Locate then Correct: Debiasing Attention Heads in CLIP

Wei Jie Yeo, Rui Mao, Moloud Abdar, Erik Cambria, Ranjan Satapathy

TL;DR: This work propose an interpretability-inspired technique that improves CLIP models on image classification task with spurious correlations.

Abstract: Multimodal models like CLIP have gained significant attention due to their remarkable zero-shot performance across various tasks. However, studies have revealed that CLIP can inadvertently learn spurious associations between target variables and confounding factors. To address this, we introduce \textsc{Locate-Then-Correct} (LTC), a contrastive framework that identifies spurious attention heads in Vision Transformers via mechanistic insights and mitigates them through targeted ablation. Furthermore, LTC identifies salient, task-relevant attention heads, enabling the integration of discriminative features through orthogonal projection to improve classification performance. We evaluate LTC on benchmarks with inherent background and gender biases, achieving over a > 50% gain in worst-group accuracy compared to non-training post-hoc baselines. Additionally, we visualize the representation of selected heads and find that the presented interpretation corroborates our contrastive mechanism for identifying both spurious and salient attention heads.

Lay Summary: Vision models are often plagued by spurious correlations in vision classification tasks. We propose a novel debiasing technique that targets targets specific attention heads for debiasing and further concept enhancement. We find that targetted interventions outperform debiasing baselines that perform on the final vision or text representation.

Primary Area: Social Aspects->Fairness

Keywords: debiasing, clip, interpretability

Submission Number: 34470