CODA: A Correlation-Oriented Disentanglement and Augmentation Modeling Scheme for Better Resisting Subpopulation Shifts

Data-driven models learned often struggle to generalize due to widespread subpopulation shifts, especially the presence of both spurious correlations and group imbalance (SC-GI). To learn models more powerful for defending against SC-GI, we propose a Correlation-Oriented Disentanglement and Augmentation (CODA) modeling scheme, which includes two unique developments: (1) correlation-oriented disentanglement and (2) strategic sample augmentation with reweighted consistency (RWC) loss. In (1), a bi-branch encoding process is developed to enable the disentangling of variant and invariant correlations by coordinating with a decoy classifier and the decoder reconstruction. In (2), a strategic sample augmentation based on disentangled latent features with RWC loss is designed to reinforce the training of a more generalizable model. The effectiveness of CODA is verified by benchmarking against a set of SOTA models in terms of worst-group accuracy and maximum group accuracy gap based on two famous datasets, ColoredMNIST and CelebA.