Modern image classification is based upon directly predicting classes via large discriminative networks, which do not directly contain information about the intuitive visual features that may constitute a classification decision. Recently, work in vision-language models (VLM) such as CLIP has provided ways to specify natural language descriptions of image classes, but typically focuses on providing single descriptions for each class. In this work, we demonstrate that an alternative approach, in line with humans' understanding of multiple visual features per class, can also provide compelling performance in the robust few-shot learning setting. In particular, we introduce a novel method, \textit{SLR-AVD (Sparse Logistic Regression using Augmented Visual Descriptors)}. This method first automatically generates multiple visual descriptions of each class via a large language model (LLM), then uses a VLM to translate these descriptions to a set of visual feature embeddings of each image, and finally uses sparse logistic regression to select a relevant subset of these features to classify each image. Core to our approach is the fact that, information-theoretically, these descriptive features are more invariant to domain shift than traditional image embeddings, even though the VLM training process is not explicitly designed for invariant representation learning. These invariant descriptive features also compose a better input compression scheme. When combined with finetuning, we show that SLR-AVD is able to outperform existing state-of-the-art finetuning approaches on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution performance.

Learning visual representations with interpretable features, i.e., disentangled representations, remains a challenging problem. Existing methods demonstrate some success but are hard to apply to large-scale vision datasets like ImageNet. In this work, we propose a simple post-processing framework to disentangle content and style in learned representations from pre-trained vision models. We model the pre-trained features probabilistically as linearly entangled combinations of the latent content and style factors and develop a simple disentanglement algorithm based on the probabilistic model. We show that the method provably disentangles content and style features and verify its efficacy empirically. Our post-processed features yield significant domain generalization performance improvements when the distribution shift occurs due to style changes or style-related spurious correlations.

Rapid development in deep learning model construction has prompted an increased need for appropriate training data. The popularity of large datasets - sometimes known as "big data" - has diverted attention from assessing their quality. Training on large datasets often requires excessive system resources and an infeasible amount of time. Furthermore, the supervised machine learning process has yet to be fully automated: for supervised learning, large datasets require more time for manually labeling samples. We propose a method of curating smaller datasets with comparable out-of-distribution model accuracy after an initial training session using an appropriate distribution of samples classified by how difficult it is for a model to learn from them.

Deep neural network, despite its remarkable capability of discriminating targeted in-distribution samples, shows poor performance on detecting anomalous out-of-distribution data. To address this defect, state-of-the-art solutions choose to train deep networks on an auxiliary dataset of outliers. Various training criteria for these auxiliary outliers are proposed based on heuristic intuitions. However, we find that these intuitively designed outlier training criteria can hurt in-distribution learning and eventually lead to inferior performance. To this end, we identify three causes of the in-distribution incompatibility: contradictory gradient, false likelihood, and distribution shift. Based on our new understandings, we propose a new out-of-distribution detection method by adapting both the top-design of deep models and the loss function. Our method achieves in-distribution compatibility by pursuing less interference with the probabilistic characteristic of in-distribution features. On several benchmarks, our method not only achieves the state-of-the-art out-of-distribution detection performance but also improves the in-distribution accuracy.