BiaSwap: Removing Dataset Bias With Bias-Tailored Swapping Augmentation

Eungyeup Kim, Jihyeon Lee, Jaegul Choo; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021, pp. 14992-15001

Deep neural networks often make decisions based on the spurious correlations inherent in the dataset, failing to generalize in an unbiased data distribution. Although previous approaches pre-define the type of dataset bias to prevent the network from learning it, recognizing the bias type in the real dataset is often prohibitive. This paper proposes a novel bias-tailored augmentation-based approach, BiaSwap, for learning debiased representation without requiring supervision on the bias type. Motivated by the phenomenon that the bias corresponds to the attributes the model learns as a shortcut, we utilize an image-to-image translation model optimized to transfer the attributes that the classifier often learns easily. As a prerequisite, we sort the training samples based on how much a biased model exploits them as a shortcut and divide them into bias-guiding and bias-contrary samples in an unsupervised manner. Afterwards, we utilize the CAM of GCE-trained classifier in the patch cooccurrence discriminator in order to focus on translating the bias attributes. Therefore, given the pair of bias-guiding and bias-contrary, the model generates the augmented bias-swapped image which contains the bias attributes from the bias-contrary images, while preserving bias-irrelevant ones in the bias-guiding images. We demonstrate the superiority of our approach against the baselines over both synthetic and real-world datasets. Even without careful supervision on the bias, BiaSwap achieves a remarkable performance on both unbiased and bias-guiding samples, implying the improved generalization capability of the model.