Revisiting the Dataset Bias Problem from a Statistical Perspective
Kien Do Dung Nguyen Hung Le Thao Le Dang Nguyen Haripriya Harikumar Truyen Tran Santu Rana Svetha Venkatesh
In this paper, we study the "dataset bias" problem from a statistical
standpoint, and identify the main cause of the problem as the strong
correlation between a class attribute u and a non-class attribute b in the
input x, represented by p(u|b) differing significantly from p(u). Since p(u|b)
appears as part of the sampling distributions in the standard maximum
log-likelihood (MLL) objective, a model trained on a biased dataset via MLL
inherently incorporates such correlation into its parameters, leading to poor
generalization to unbiased test data. From this observation, we propose to
mitigate dataset bias via either weighting the objective of each sample n by
\frac{1}{p(u_{n}|b_{n})} or sampling that sample with a weight proportional to
\frac{1}{p(u_{n}|b_{n})}. While both methods are statistically equivalent, the
former proves more stable and effective in practice. Additionally, we establish
a connection between our debiasing approach and causal reasoning, reinforcing
our method's theoretical foundation. However, when the bias label is
unavailable, computing p(u|b) exactly is difficult. To overcome this challenge,
we propose to approximate \frac{1}{p(u|b)} using a biased classifier trained
with "bias amplification" losses. Extensive experiments on various biased
datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method over existing debiasing
techniques in most settings, validating our theoretical analysis.