CORE MACHINE LEARNING

Linear unit-tests for invariance discovery

October 08, 2021

Abstract

There is an increasing interest in algorithms to learn invariant correlations across training environments. A big share of the current proposals find theoretical support in the causality literature but, how useful are they in practice? The purpose of this note is to propose six linear low-dimensional problems —“unit tests”— to evaluate different types of out-of-distribution generalization in a precise manner. Following initial experiments, none of three recently proposed alternatives passes all tests. By providing the code to automatically replicate all the results in this manuscript (https://www.github.com/facebookresearch/ InvarianceUnitTests), we hope that our unit tests become a standard stepping stone for researchers in out-of-distribution generalization. https://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/causality/neurips20ws/

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AUTHORS

Written by

Leon Bottou

Aga Slowik

Benjamin Charles Aubin

David Lopez-Paz

Publisher

Causality-Neurips-Workshop

Research Topics

Core Machine Learning

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