Does Progress On Object Recognition Benchmarks Improve Real-World
  Generalization?
Megan Richards Polina Kirichenko Diane Bouchacourt Mark Ibrahim
For more than a decade, researchers have measured progress in object
recognition on ImageNet-based generalization benchmarks such as ImageNet-A, -C,
and -R. Recent advances in foundation models, trained on orders of magnitude
more data, have begun to saturate these standard benchmarks, but remain brittle
in practice. This suggests standard benchmarks, which tend to focus on
predefined or synthetic changes, may not be sufficient for measuring real world
generalization. Consequently, we propose studying generalization across
geography as a more realistic measure of progress using two datasets of objects
from households across the globe. We conduct an extensive empirical evaluation
of progress across nearly 100 vision models up to most recent foundation
models. We first identify a progress gap between standard benchmarks and
real-world, geographical shifts: progress on ImageNet results in up to 2.5x
more progress on standard generalization benchmarks than real-world
distribution shifts. Second, we study model generalization across geographies
by measuring the disparities in performance across regions, a more fine-grained
measure of real world generalization. We observe all models have large
geographic disparities, even foundation CLIP models, with differences of 7-20%
in accuracy between regions. Counter to modern intuition, we discover progress
on standard benchmarks fails to improve geographic disparities and often
exacerbates them: geographic disparities between the least performant models
and today's best models have more than tripled. Our results suggest scaling
alone is insufficient for consistent robustness to real-world distribution
shifts. Finally, we highlight in early experiments how simple last layer
retraining on more representative, curated data can complement scaling as a
promising direction of future work, reducing geographic disparity on both
benchmarks by over two-thirds.