Distributionally Robust Set Representation Learning Under Inference-Time Element Corruption
Abstract
Standard Set Representation Learning methods typically excel on curated data but often overlook the challenge of inference-time element corruption. This refers to scenarios where deployed models encounter element-level degradations, such as outliers or missing components, that may distort set representation and degrade performance. We propose SW-DRSO, a distributionally robust optimization framework tailored for sets. Rather than minimizing loss solely on observed training data, SW-DRSO optimizes a tractable surrogate of the worst-case expected loss over a family of plausible inference-time variations. We introduce a barycentric adversary that approximates the intractable search over corrupted sets by a differentiable training-time optimization over simplex weights. Extensive experiments across four tasks demonstrate that SW-DRSO effectively enhances robustness against corruption while maintaining high overall performance.
Comments: Accepted by ICML'26
Cite
@article{arxiv.2605.30089,
title = {Distributionally Robust Set Representation Learning Under Inference-Time Element Corruption},
author = {Yankai Chen and Hanrong Zhang and Bowei He and Philip S. Yu and Xue and Liu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.30089},
year = {2026}
}