7.1LGJan 8, 2025
An Analysis of Model Robustness across Concurrent Distribution ShiftsMyeongho Jeon, Suhwan Choi, Hyoje Lee et al.
Machine learning models, meticulously optimized for source data, often fail to predict target data when faced with distribution shifts (DSs). Previous benchmarking studies, though extensive, have mainly focused on simple DSs. Recognizing that DSs often occur in more complex forms in real-world scenarios, we broadened our study to include multiple concurrent shifts, such as unseen domain shifts combined with spurious correlations. We evaluated 26 algorithms that range from simple heuristic augmentations to zero-shot inference using foundation models, across 168 source-target pairs from eight datasets. Our analysis of over 100K models reveals that (i) concurrent DSs typically worsen performance compared to a single shift, with certain exceptions, (ii) if a model improves generalization for one distribution shift, it tends to be effective for others, and (iii) heuristic data augmentations achieve the best overall performance on both synthetic and real-world datasets.
3.6CVMay 17, 2025
Revisiting Residual Connections: Orthogonal Updates for Stable and Efficient Deep NetworksGiyeong Oh, Woohyun Cho, Siyeol Kim et al.
Residual connections are pivotal for deep neural networks, enabling greater depth by mitigating vanishing gradients. However, in standard residual updates, the module's output is directly added to the input stream. This can lead to updates that predominantly reinforce or modulate the existing stream direction, potentially underutilizing the module's capacity for learning entirely novel features. In this work, we introduce Orthogonal Residual Update: we decompose the module's output relative to the input stream and add only the component orthogonal to this stream. This design aims to guide modules to contribute primarily new representational directions, fostering richer feature learning while promoting more efficient training. We demonstrate that our orthogonal update strategy improves generalization accuracy and training stability across diverse architectures (ResNetV2, Vision Transformers) and datasets (CIFARs, TinyImageNet, ImageNet-1k), achieving, for instance, a +3.78 pp top-1 accuracy gain for ViT-B on ImageNet-1k.