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Spurious correlation caused by subgroup underrepresentation has received increasing attention as a source of bias that can be perpetuated by deep neural networks (DNNs). Distributionally robust optimization has shown success in addressing…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-08-15 Nilesh Kumar , Ruby Shrestha , Zhiyuan Li , Linwei Wang

Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) has been introduced for solving stochastic programs where the distribution of the random parameters is unknown and must be estimated by samples from that distribution. A key element of DRO is the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-01-09 Xi Chen , Qihang Lin , Guanglin Xu

The performance of machine learning (ML) models critically depends on the quality and representativeness of the training data. In applications with multiple heterogeneous data generating sources, standard ML methods often learn spurious…

Few-shot learning requires models to generalize under limited supervision while remaining robust to distribution shifts. Existing Sinkhorn Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO) methods provide theoretical guarantees but rely on a fixed…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-17 Haixiang Sun , Andrew L. Liu

Machine learning models are known to learn spurious correlations, i.e., features having strong relations with class labels but no causal relation. Relying on those correlations leads to poor performance in the data groups without these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Phuong Quynh Le , Jörg Schlötterer , Christin Seifert

Many machine learning tasks involve subpopulation shift where the testing data distribution is a subpopulation of the training distribution. For such settings, a line of recent work has proposed the use of a variant of empirical risk…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-14 Runtian Zhai , Chen Dan , J. Zico Kolter , Pradeep Ravikumar

Stochastic and (distributionally) robust optimization problems often become computationally challenging as the number of scenarios or data points increases. Scenario reduction is therefore a key technique for improving tractability. We…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-10 Kevin-Martin Aigner , Sebastian Denzler , Frauke Liers , Sebastian Pokutta , Kartikey Sharma

Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) incorporates robustness against uncertainty in the specification of probabilistic models. This paper focuses on mitigating the curse of dimensionality in data-driven DRO problems with optimal…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-11-01 Lotfi M. Chaouach , Tom Oomen , Dimitris Boskos

Spurious correlations in training data often lead to robustness issues since models learn to use them as shortcuts. For example, when predicting whether an object is a cow, a model might learn to rely on its green background, so it would do…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-12-14 Raghav Mehta , Vítor Albiero , Li Chen , Ivan Evtimov , Tamar Glaser , Zhiheng Li , Tal Hassner

This paper studies Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO), a fundamental framework for enhancing the robustness and generalization of statistical learning and optimization. An effective ambiguity set for DRO must involve distributions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Jiaqi Wen , Jianyi Yang

This paper studies Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO), a fundamental framework for enhancing the robustness and generalization of statistical learning and optimization. An effective ambiguity set for DRO must involve distributions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Jiaqi Wen , Jianyi Yang

While the traditional formulation of machine learning tasks is in terms of performance on average, in practice we are often interested in how well a trained model performs on rare or difficult data points at test time. To achieve more…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-29 Matthew J. Holland , Toma Hamada

We consider the problem of training a classification model with group annotated training data. Recent work has established that, if there is distribution shift across different groups, models trained using the standard empirical risk…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-21 Vihari Piratla , Praneeth Netrapalli , Sunita Sarawagi

Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) problems are increasingly seen as a viable method to train machine learning models for improved model generalization. These min-max formulations, however, are more difficult to solve. We therefore…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-11-03 Soumyadip Ghosh , Mark Squillante , Ebisa Wollega

Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) is a powerful framework for training robust models against data distribution shifts. This paper focuses on constrained DRO, which has an explicit characterization of the robustness level. Existing…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-04-02 Qi Zhang , Yi Zhou , Ashley Prater-Bennette , Lixin Shen , Shaofeng Zou

Offline reinforcement learning aims to learn from pre-collected datasets without active exploration. This problem faces significant challenges, including limited data availability and distributional shifts. Existing approaches adopt a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-01 Yue Wang , Jinjun Xiong , Shaofeng Zou

Knowledge distillation enables fast and effective transfer of features learned from a bigger model to a smaller one. However, distillation objectives are susceptible to sub-population shifts, a common scenario in medical imaging analysis…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-11-02 Konstantinos Vilouras , Xiao Liu , Pedro Sanchez , Alison Q. O'Neil , Sotirios A. Tsaftaris

We review distributionally robust optimization (DRO), a principled approach for constructing statistical estimators that hedge against the impact of deviations in the expected loss between the training and deployment environments. Many…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-01-29 Jose Blanchet , Jiajin Li , Sirui Lin , Xuhui Zhang

It is known that the set of perturbed data is key in robust optimization (RO) modelling. Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) is a methodology used for optimization problems affected by random parameters with uncertain probability…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-05-09 Yueyao Li , Wenxun Xing

Deep classifiers are known to rely on spurious features $\unicode{x2013}$ patterns which are correlated with the target on the training data but not inherently relevant to the learning problem, such as the image backgrounds when classifying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-21 Pavel Izmailov , Polina Kirichenko , Nate Gruver , Andrew Gordon Wilson