Model Diagnosis and Correction via Linguistic and Implicit Attribute Editing

Xuanbai Chen, Xiang Xu, Zhihua Li, Tianchen Zhao, Pietro Perona, Qin Zhang, Yifan Xing; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2025, pp. 14281-14292

How can we troubleshoot a deep visual model, i.e., understand why it makes certain mistakes and further take action to correct its behavior? We design a Model Diagnosis and Correction system (MDC), an automated framework that analyzes the pattern of errors, proposes candidate causes of attributes, conducts hypothesis testing via attribute editing, and ultimately generates counterfactual training samples to improve the performance of the model. Unlike previous methods, in addition to the linguistic attributes, our method also incorporates the analysis for implicit causal attributes, those cannot to be accurately described by language. To achieve this, we propose an image editing module capable of leveraging both implicit and linguistic attributes to generate counterfactual images depicting error patterns and further experimentally validate causality relationships. Lastly, we enrich the training set with synthetic samples depicting verified causal attributes and retrain the model, further boosting accuracy and robustness. Extensive experiments on fine-grained classification and face security applications demonstrate the superiority of our approach in model diagnosis and correction. Specifically, we achieve an average relative improvement of 62.01% in HTER for face security application over state-of-the-art methods.