Environment-biased Feature Ranking for Novelty Detection Robustness

• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2309.12301
• Publication Date: 2023-01-01
• Authors: Smeu, Stefan; Burceanu, Elena; Haller, Emanuela; Nicolicioiu, Andr...
• Keywords: FOS: Computer and information sciences; Computer Science - Machine Learning; Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computer Science - Artificial Intelligence; Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Computer Science - Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition; Machine Learning (cs.LG)

The updated, long version of the paper is available at arXiv:2310.03738<br/>We tackle the problem of robust novelty detection, where we aim to detect novelties in terms of semantic content while being invariant to changes in other, irrelevant factors. Specifically, we operate in a setup with multiple environments, where we determine the set of features that are associated more with the environments, rather than to the content relevant for the task. Thus, we propose a method that starts with a pretrained embedding and a multi-env setup and manages to rank the features based on their environment-focus. First, we compute a per-feature score based on the feature distribution variance between envs. Next, we show that by dropping the highly scored ones, we manage to remove spurious correlations and improve the overall performance by up to 6%, both in covariance and sub-population shift cases, both for a real and a synthetic benchmark, that we introduce for this task.<br/>