用树形结构自动发现数据中的隐藏分组,提升模型对少数群体的鲁棒性。
Discovering Latent Groups for Robust Classification

- 构建树状神经分类器,通过预测正确性动态划分样本路径。
- 在五个基准上实现与顶尖方法相当的鲁棒性,且能识别少数群体。
- 无需标签即可发现隐含分组,适合需要可解释性的场景。
机器学习模型常依赖虚假相关性,在平均准确率高时却对少数子群体表现差。现有方法通过调整参数缓解问题,但依赖子群标注或伪标签。本文提出神经分类树(NCT),将子群结构编码于树形架构中。通过根据预测正确性将样本路由至“易”或“难”节点,并复用路径作为下一轮伪标签,NCT在无子群监督下解耦冲突子群。在五个涵盖二分类与多分类虚假相关性的基准上验证,所学树结构能稳定隔离少数群体,提供模型架构与数据潜在分组之间的透明映射,兼具可解释性与竞争性鲁棒性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Machine learning models exploit spurious correlations, achieving high average accuracy but failing disproportionately on underrepresented subgroups. Existing methods address this by adjusting network parameters, guided either by subgroup annotations or inferred pseudo-group labels. Yet at inference, these methods produce only a class prediction, with no insight into a sample's latent subgroup. We propose neural classification trees (NCT), a framework that achieves robustness by encoding subgroup structure in its tree-shaped architecture. By routing each sample to an "easy" or "hard" node of this tree -- based on prediction correctness -- and reusing these routes as pseudo-labels for the next iteration, NCT disentangles conflicting subgroups, without requiring subgroup supervision. We evaluate NCT on five benchmarks spanning binary and multi-class spurious correlations. Our experiments show that the learned tree topology provides strong interpretability by consistently isolating minority subgroups, which provides a transparent mapping between the model architecture and the data's latent group structure, while yielding competitive robustness with state-of-the-art methods.
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