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Yan Zhang

Alumni

Publications

Unsupervised Concept Discovery Mitigates Spurious Correlations
Md Rifat Arefin
Yan Zhang
Aristide Baratin
Francesco Locatello
Irina Rish
Dianbo Liu
Kenji Kawaguchi
Models prone to spurious correlations in training data often produce brittle predictions and introduce unintended biases. Addressing this ch… (see more)allenge typically involves methods relying on prior knowledge and group annotation to remove spurious correlations, which may not be readily available in many applications. In this paper, we establish a novel connection between unsupervised object-centric learning and mitigation of spurious correlations. Instead of directly inferring subgroups with varying correlations with labels, our approach focuses on discovering concepts: discrete ideas that are shared across input samples. Leveraging existing object-centric representation learning, we introduce CoBalT: a concept balancing technique that effectively mitigates spurious correlations without requiring human labeling of subgroups. Evaluation across the benchmark datasets for sub-population shifts demonstrate superior or competitive performance compared state-of-the-art baselines, without the need for group annotation. Code is available at https://github.com/rarefin/CoBalT.
2024-07-07
Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning (published)
doi.org
proceedings.mlr.press
Object-Centric Architectures Enable Efficient Causal Representation Learning
Amin Mansouri
Jason Hartford
Yan Zhang
Yoshua Bengio
Causal representation learning has showed a variety of settings in which we can disentangle latent variables with identifiability guarantees… (see more) (up to some reasonable equivalence class). Common to all of these approaches is the assumption that (1) the latent variables are represented as
2024-01-15
ICLR.cc/2024/Conference (poster)
doi.org
openreview.net
CrossSplit: Mitigating Label Noise Memorization through Data Splitting
Jihye Kim
Aristide Baratin
Yan Zhang
Simon Lacoste-Julien
We approach the problem of improving robustness of deep learning algorithms in the presence of label noise. Building upon existing label cor… (see more)rection and co-teaching methods, we propose a novel training procedure to mitigate the memorization of noisy labels, called CrossSplit, which uses a pair of neural networks trained on two disjoint parts of the labelled dataset. CrossSplit combines two main ingredients: (i) Cross-split label correction. The idea is that, since the model trained on one part of the data cannot memorize example-label pairs from the other part, the training labels presented to each network can be smoothly adjusted by using the predictions of its peer network; (ii) Cross-split semi-supervised training. A network trained on one part of the data also uses the unlabeled inputs of the other part. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, Tiny-ImageNet and mini-WebVision datasets demonstrate that our method can outperform the current state-of-the-art in a wide range of noise ratios.
2023-07-02
Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (published)
doi.org
proceedings.mlr.press
Equivariance with Learned Canonicalization Functions
Sékou-Oumar Kaba
Arnab Kumar Mondal
Yan Zhang
Yoshua Bengio
Siamak Ravanbakhsh
Symmetry-based neural networks often constrain the architecture in order to achieve invariance or equivariance to a group of transformations… (see more). In this paper, we propose an alternative that avoids this architectural constraint by learning to produce canonical representations of the data. These canonicalization functions can readily be plugged into non-equivariant backbone architectures. We offer explicit ways to implement them for some groups of interest. We show that this approach enjoys universality while providing interpretable insights. Our main hypothesis, supported by our empirical results, is that learning a small neural network to perform canonicalization is better than using predefined heuristics. Our experiments show that learning the canonicalization function is competitive with existing techniques for learning equivariant functions across many tasks, including image classification,
2023-07-02
Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (published)
doi.org
proceedings.mlr.press
Unlocking Slot Attention by Changing Optimal Transport Costs
Yan Zhang
David W. Zhang
Simon Lacoste-Julien
Gertjan J. Burghouts
Cees G. M. Snoek
Slot attention is a powerful method for object-centric modeling in images and videos. However, its set-equivariance limits its ability to ha… (see more)ndle videos with a dynamic number of objects because it cannot break ties. To overcome this limitation, we first establish a connection between slot attention and optimal transport. Based on this new perspective we propose MESH (Minimize Entropy of Sinkhorn): a cross-attention module that combines the tiebreaking properties of unregularized optimal transport with the speed of regularized optimal transport. We evaluate slot attention using MESH on multiple object-centric learning benchmarks and find significant improvements over slot attention in every setting.
2023-07-02
Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (published)
doi.org
proceedings.mlr.press