Detecting Spurious Correlations via Robust Visual Concepts in Real and AI-Generated Image Classification

Abstract

Often machine learning models tend to automatically learn associations present in the training data without questioning their validity or appropriateness. This undesirable property is the root cause of the manifestation of spurious correlations, which render models unreliable and prone to failure in the presence of distribution shifts. Research shows that most methods attempting to remedy spurious correlations are only effective for a model's known spurious associations. Current spurious correlation detection algorithms either rely on extensive human annotations or are too restrictive in their formulation. Moreover, they rely on strict definitions of visual artifacts that may not apply to data produced by generative models, as they are known to hallucinate contents that do not conform to standard specifications. In this work, we introduce a general-purpose method that efficiently detects potential spurious correlations, and requires significantly less human interference in comparison to the prior art. Additionally, the proposed method provides intuitive explanations while eliminating the need for pixel-level annotations. We demonstrate the proposed method's tolerance to the peculiarity of AI-generated images, which is a considerably challenging task, one where most of the existing methods fall short. Consequently, our method is also suitable for detecting spurious correlations that may propagate to downstream applications originating from generative models.