Towards Real World Debiasing: A Fine-grained Analysis On Spurious Correlation

Zhibo Wang, Peng Kuang, Zhixuan Chu, Jingyi Wang, Kui Ren

Keywords: spurious correlation, dataset bias, debias

TL;DR: We raise and explore the problem of debiasing under real-world scenarios.

Abstract: Spurious correlations in training data significantly hinder the generalization capability of machine learning models when faced with distribution shifts in real-world scenarios. To tackle the problem, numerous debias approaches have been proposed and benchmarked on datasets intentionally designed with severe biases. However, it remains to be asked: \textit{1. Do existing benchmarks really capture biases in the real world? 2. Can existing debias methods handle biases in the real world?} To answer the questions, we revisit biased distributions in existing benchmarks and real-world datasets, and propose a fine-grained framework for analyzing dataset bias by disentangling it into the magnitude and prevalence of bias. We observe and theoretically demonstrate that existing benchmarks poorly represent real-world biases. We further introduce two novel biased distributions to bridge this gap, forming a nuanced evaluation framework for real-world debiasing. Building upon these results, we evaluate existing debias methods with our evaluation framework. Results show that existing methods are incapable of handling real-world biases. Through in-depth analysis, we propose a simple yet effective approach that can be easily applied to existing debias methods, named Debias in Destruction (DiD). Empirical results on real-world datasets in both image and language modalities demonstrate the superiority of DiD, improving the performance of existing methods on all types of biases within the proposed evaluation framework.

Primary Area: alignment, fairness, safety, privacy, and societal considerations

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Submission Number: 4418