English
Related papers

Related papers: The Risks of Invariant Risk Minimization

200 papers

We propose a novel unsupervised framework for \emph{Invariant Risk Minimization} (IRM), extending the concept of invariance to settings where labels are unavailable. Traditional IRM methods rely on labeled data to learn representations that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Yotam Norman , Ron Meir

Machine learning can benefit from causal discovery for interpretation and from causal inference for generalization. In this line of research, a few invariant learning algorithms for out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization have been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-06 Borja Guerrero Santillan

Due to spurious correlations, machine learning systems often fail to generalize to environments whose distributions differ from the ones used at training time. Prior work addressing this, either explicitly or implicitly, attempted to find a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-19 Chaochao Lu , Yuhuai Wu , Jośe Miguel Hernández-Lobato , Bernhard Schölkopf

Machine learning algorithms with empirical risk minimization usually suffer from poor generalization performance due to the greedy exploitation of correlations among the training data, which are not stable under distributional shifts.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-18 Jiashuo Liu , Zheyuan Hu , Peng Cui , Bo Li , Zheyan Shen

Invariant risk minimization (IRM) has recently emerged as a promising alternative for domain generalization. Nevertheless, the loss function is difficult to optimize for nonlinear classifiers and the original optimization objective could…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-22 Bo Li , Yifei Shen , Yezhen Wang , Wenzhen Zhu , Colorado J. Reed , Jun Zhang , Dongsheng Li , Kurt Keutzer , Han Zhao

Domain generalization aims to develop a model that can perform well on unseen target domains by learning from multiple source domains. However, recent-proposed domain generalization models usually rely on domain labels, which may not be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Zongbin Wang , Bin Pan , Zhenwei Shi

Out-of-distribution generalization under distributional shifts remains a critical challenge for graph neural networks. Existing methods generally adopt the Invariant Risk Minimization (IRM) framework, requiring costly environment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Yang Qiu , Yixiong Zou , Jun Wang , Wei Liu , Xiangyu Fu , Ruixuan Li

The invariance principle from causality is at the heart of notable approaches such as invariant risk minimization (IRM) that seek to address out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization failures. Despite the promising theory, invariance…

Enhancing the stability of machine learning algorithms under distributional shifts is at the heart of the Out-of-Distribution (OOD) Generalization problem. Derived from causal learning, recent works of invariant learning pursue strict…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-15 Jiashuo Liu , Jiayun Wu , Jie Peng , Xiaoyu Wu , Yang Zheng , Bo Li , Peng Cui

In this paper we present a controlled study on the linearized IRM framework (IRMv1) introduced in Arjovsky et al. (2020). We show that IRMv1 (and its variants) framework can be potentially unstable under small changes to the optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Chunyang Xiao , Pranava Madhyastha

Inferring causal individual treatment effect (ITE) from observational data is a challenging problem whose difficulty is exacerbated by the presence of treatment assignment bias. In this work, we propose a new way to estimate the ITE using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-16 Abhin Shah , Kartik Ahuja , Karthikeyan Shanmugam , Dennis Wei , Kush Varshney , Amit Dhurandhar

The empirical risk minimization approach to data-driven decision making requires access to training data drawn under the same conditions as those that will be faced when the decision rule is deployed. However, in a number of settings, we…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-09-17 Roshni Sahoo , Lihua Lei , Stefan Wager

Machine learning models have exhibited exceptional results in various domains. The most prevalent approach for learning is the empirical risk minimizer (ERM), which adapts the model's weights to reduce the loss on a training set and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-11 Koby Bibas

Invariant prediction uses the prediction stability of causal relationships across different environments to identify causal variables. Conversely, using causal variables gives prediction guarantees even in out-of-sample data settings. In…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-11-04 Lucas Kania , Ernst Wit

The ability to generalize under distributional shifts is essential to reliable machine learning, while models optimized with empirical risk minimization usually fail on non-$i.i.d$ testing data. Recently, invariant learning methods for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-26 Jiashuo Liu , Zheyuan Hu , Peng Cui , Bo Li , Zheyan Shen

We develop new methods to integrate experimental and observational data in causal inference. While randomized controlled trials offer strong internal validity, they are often costly and therefore limited in sample size. Observational data,…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-11-04 Xuelin Yang , Licong Lin , Susan Athey , Michael I. Jordan , Guido W. Imbens

Invariant representation learning (IRL) encourages the prediction from invariant causal features to labels de-confounded from the environments, advancing the technical roadmap of out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization. Despite spotlights…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-18 Ziliang Chen , Yongsen Zheng , Zhao-Rong Lai , Quanlong Guan , Liang Lin

Deep learning models excel in computer vision tasks but often fail to generalize to out-of-distribution (OOD) domains. Invariant Risk Minimization (IRM) aims to address OOD generalization by learning domain-invariant features. However, IRM…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-01-24 Yaoyao Zhu , Xiuding Cai , Yingkai Wang , Dong Miao , Zhongliang Fu , Xu Luo

A fundamental assumption of most machine learning algorithms is that the training and test data are drawn from the same underlying distribution. However, this assumption is violated in almost all practical applications: machine learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-02 Marvin Zhang , Henrik Marklund , Nikita Dhawan , Abhishek Gupta , Sergey Levine , Chelsea Finn

Many machine learning models appear to deploy effortlessly under distribution shift, and perform well on a target distribution that is considerably different from the training distribution. Yet, learning theory of distribution shift bounds…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-30 Robi Bhattacharjee , Nick Rittler , Kamalika Chaudhuri