Theoretically, we prove that SFB can learn an asymptotically-optimal predictor without test-domain labels. Empirically, we demonstrate the effectiveness of SFB on real and synthetic data.

Machine learning models often fail on out-of-distribution data.

Distribution shifts between sites can seriously degrade model performance since models are prone to exploiting unstable correlations. Thus, many methods try to find features that are stable across sites and discard unstable features. However, unstable features might have complementary information that, if used appropriately, could increase accuracy. More recent methods try to adapt to unstable features at the new sites to achieve higher accuracy. However, they make unrealistic assumptions or fail to scale to multiple confounding features. We propose Generalized Prevalence Adjustment (GPA for short), a flexible method that adjusts model predictions to the shifting correlations between prediction target and confounders to safely exploit unstable features. GPA can infer the interaction between target and confounders in new sites using unlabeled samples from those sites. We evaluate GPA on several real and synthetic datasets, and show that it outperforms competitive baselines.

To avoid failures on out-of-distribution data, recent works have sought to extract features that have an invariant or stable relationship with the label across domains, discarding "spurious" or unstable features whose relationship with the label changes across domains. However, unstable features often carry complementary information that could boost performance if used correctly in the test domain. In this work, we show how this can be done without test-domain labels. In particular, we prove that pseudo-labels based on stable features provide sufficient guidance for doing so, provided that stable and unstable features are conditionally independent given the label. Based on this theoretical insight, we propose Stable Feature Boosting (SFB), an algorithm for: (i) learning a predictor that separates stable and conditionally-independent unstable features; and (ii) using the stable-feature predictions to adapt the unstable-feature predictions in the test domain. Theoretically, we prove that SFB can learn an asymptotically-optimal predictor without test-domain labels. Empirically, we demonstrate the effectiveness of SFB on real and synthetic data.

We study transfer learning in the presence of spurious correlations. We experimentally demonstrate that directly transferring the stable feature extractor learned on the source task may not eliminate these biases for the target task. However, we hypothesize that the unstable features in the source task and those in the target task are directly related. By explicitly informing the target classifier of the source task's unstable features, we can regularize the biases in the target task. Specifically, we derive a representation that encodes the unstable features by contrasting different data environments in the source task. On the target task, we cluster data from this representation, and achieve robustness by minimizing the worst-case risk across all clusters. We evaluate our method on both text and image classifications. Empirical results demonstrate that our algorithm is able to maintain robustness on the target task, outperforming the best baseline by 22.9% in absolute accuracy across 12 transfer settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/YujiaBao/Tofu.