Out-of-distribution (OOD) generalisation aims to build a model that can generalise well on an unseen target domain using knowledge from multiple source domains. To this end, the model should seek the causal dependence between inputs and labels, which may be determined by the semantics of inputs and remain invariant across domains. However, statistical or non-causal methods often cannot capture this dependence and perform poorly due to not considering spurious correlations learnt from model training via unobserved confounders. A well-known existing causal inference method like back-door adjustment cannot be applied to remove spurious correlations as it requires the observation of confounders. In this paper, we propose a novel method that effectively deals with hidden confounders by successfully implementing front-door adjustment (FA). FA requires the choice of a mediator, which we regard as the semantic information of images that helps access the causal mechanism without the need for observing confounders. Further, we propose to estimate the combination of the mediator with other observed images in the front-door formula via style transfer algorithms. Our use of style transfer to estimate FA is novel and sensible for OOD generalisation, which we justify by extensive experimental results on widely used benchmark datasets.
Cambridge Research Laboratory（剑桥研究实验室）；Toshiba Europe Limited（东芝欧洲有限公司）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）
In this paper we present a world model, which learns causal features using the invariance principle. In particular, we use contrastive unsupervised learning to learn the invariant causal features, which enforces invariance across augmentations of irrelevant parts or styles of the observation. The world-model-based reinforcement learning methods independently optimize representation learning and the policy. Thus naive contrastive loss implementation collapses due to a lack of supervisory signals to the representation learning module. We propose an intervention invariant auxiliary task to mitiga…
Casual Inference via Style Bias Deconfounding for Domain Generalization
Academy of Medical Engineering and Translational Medicine, Tianjin University（天津大学医学工程与转化医学学院）；College of Intelligence and Computing, Tianjin University（天津大学智能与计算学部）；Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学化学与生物工程学系）
Faculty of Data Science,City University of Macau（数据科学学院，澳门城市大学）；Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；Zhejiang Cloudpeng Technology Co., Ltd.（浙江云鹏科技有限公司）
Background and objectives. Domain shift is a generalisation problem of machine learning models that occurs when the data distribution of the training set is different to the data distribution encountered by the model when it is deployed. This is common in the context of biomedical image segmentation due to the variance of experimental conditions, equipment, and capturing settings. In this work, we address this challenge by studying both neural style transfer algorithms and unpaired image-to-image translation methods in the context of the segmentation of tumour spheroids. Methods. We have illus…
A Causality-Inspired Model for Intima-Media Thickening Assessment in Ultrasound Videos
School of Biological Science and Medical Engineering, Southeast University（东南大学生物科学与医学工程学院）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University（东南大学计算机科学与工程学院）；Peking Union Medical College Hospital, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences（中国医学科学院北京协和医学院医院）
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)（洛桑联邦理工学院）
Learning behavioral patterns from observational data has been a de-facto approach to motion forecasting. Yet, the current paradigm suffers from two shortcomings: brittle under distribution shifts and inefficient for knowledge transfer. In this work, we propose to address these challenges from a causal representation perspective. We first introduce a causal formalism of motion forecasting, which casts the problem as a dynamic process with three groups of latent variables, namely invariant variables, style confounders, and spurious features. We then introduce a learning framework that treats eac…
Agency for Defense Development (ADD)（国防发展局）；Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)（韩国高等科学技术研究院）
Training a deep learning model with artificially generated data can be an alternative when training data are scarce, yet it suffers from poor generalization performance due to a large domain gap. In this paper, we characterize the domain gap by using a causal framework for data generation. We assume that the real and synthetic data have common content variables but different style variables. Thus, a model trained on synthetic dataset might have poor generalization as the model learns the nuisance style variables. To that end, we propose causal invariance learning which encourages the model to …
Samsung AI Center Cambridge（三星剑桥人工智能中心）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）
We tackle the domain generalisation (DG) problem by posing it as a domain adaptation (DA) task where we adversarially synthesise the worst-case target domain and adapt a model to that worst-case domain, thereby improving the model's robustness. To synthesise data that is challenging yet semantics-preserving, we generate Fourier amplitude images and combine them with source domain phase images, exploiting the widely believed conjecture from signal processing that amplitude spectra mainly determines image style, while phase data mainly captures image semantics. To synthesise a worst-case domain …
Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems Tübingen（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所（蒂宾根））；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Tübingen AI Center, University of Tübingen（蒂宾根大学蒂宾根人工智能中心）；IMPRS for Intelligent Systems（智能系统国际马克斯·普朗克研究学院）；Amazon（亚马逊）
Self-supervised representation learning has shown remarkable success in a number of domains. A common practice is to perform data augmentation via hand-crafted transformations intended to leave the semantics of the data invariant. We seek to understand the empirical success of this approach from a theoretical perspective. We formulate the augmentation process as a latent variable model by postulating a partition of the latent representation into a content component, which is assumed invariant to augmentation, and a style component, which is allowed to change. Unlike prior work on disentangleme…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）
For many practical computer vision applications, the learned models usually have high performance on the datasets used for training but suffer from significant performance degradation when deployed in new environments, where there are usually style differences between the training images and the testing images. An effective domain generalizable model is expected to be able to learn feature representations that are both generalizable and discriminative. In this paper, we design a novel Style Normalization and Restitution module (SNR) to simultaneously ensure both high generalization and discrim…
