Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2021

C OUNTERFACTUAL G ENERATIVE N ETWORKS
Axel Sauer1,2 & Andreas Geiger1,2
Autonomous Vision Group1
Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Tübingen{firstname.lastname}@tue.mpg.de2

University of Tübingen

A BSTRACTNeural networks are prone to learning shortcuts – they often model simple correlations, ignoring more complex ones that potentially generalize better. Priorworks on image classification show that instead of learning a connection to object
shape, deep classifiers tend to exploit spurious correlations with low-level texture or the background for solving the classification task. In this work, we takea step towards more robust and interpretable classifiers that explicitly expose thetask’s causal structure. Building on current advances in deep generative modeling,
we propose to decompose the image generation process into independent causal
mechanisms that we train without direct supervision. By exploiting appropriate
inductive biases, these mechanisms disentangle object shape, object texture, andbackground; hence, they allow for generating counterfactual images. We demonstrate the ability of our model to generate such images on MNIST and ImageNet.
Further, we show that the counterfactual images can improve out-of-distribution
robustness with a marginal drop in performance on the original classification task,
despite being synthetic. Lastly, our generative model can be trained efficiently ona single GPU, exploiting common pre-trained models as inductive biases.

1

I NTRODUCTION

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are the main building blocks of many state-of-the-art machine learning systems that address diverse tasks such as image classification (He et al., 2016), natural language
processing (Brown et al., 2020), and autonomous driving (Ohn-Bar et al., 2020). Despite the considerable successes of DNNs, they still struggle in many situations, e.g., classifying images perturbed
by an adversary (Szegedy et al., 2013), or failing to recognize known objects in unfamiliar contexts(Rosenfeld et al., 2018) or from unseen poses (Alcorn et al., 2019).
Many of these failures can be attributed to dataset biases (Torralba & Efros, 2011) or shortcut learning (Geirhos et al., 2020). The DNN learns the simplest correlations and tends to ignore more complex ones. This characteristic becomes problematic when the simple correlation is spurious, i.e., notpresent during inference. The motivational example of (Beery et al., 2018) considers the setting of a
DNN that is trained to recognize cows in images. A real-world dataset will typically depict cows on
green pastures in most images. The most straightforward correlation a classifier can learn to predictthe label ”cow” is hence the connection to a green, grass-textured background. Generally, this is
not a problem during inference as long as the test data follows the same distribution. However, if
we provide the classifier an image depicting a purple cow on the moon, the classifier should still
confidently assign the label ”cow.” Thus, if we want to achieve robust generalization beyond thetraining data, we need to disentangle possibly spurious correlations from causal relationships.
Distinguishing between spurious and causal correlations is one of the core questions in causality
research (Pearl, 2009; Peters et al., 2017; Schölkopf, 2019). One central concept in causality is theassumption of independent mechanisms (IM), which states that a causal generative process is composed of autonomous modules that do not influence each other. In the context of image classification(e.g., on ImageNet), we can interpret the generation of an image as a causal process (Kocaoglu et al.,2018; Goyal et al., 2019; Suter et al., 2019). We decompose this process into separate IMs, eachcontrolling one factor of variation (FoV) of the image. Concretely, we consider three IMs: one
generates the object’s shape, the second generates the object’s texture, and the third generates the
background. With access to these IMs, we can produce counterfactual images, i.e., images of unseen
combinations of FoVs. We can then train an ensemble of invariant classifiers on the generated coun1

Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2021

Generated
Counterfactual Image

Real ImageClassifier:An ostrich.

Classifier:A strawberry.

Invariant Classifier Ensemble:
An ostrich shapewith ostrich texture
on an ostrich background.

Invariant Classifier Ensemble:
An ostrich shapewith strawberry texture
on a diving background.

Figure 1: Out-of-Domain (OOD) Classification. A classifier focuses on all factors of variation(FoV) in an image. For OOD data, this can be problematic: a FoV might be a spurious correlation, hence, impairing the classifier’s performance. An ensemble, e.g., a classifier with a common
backbone and multiple heads, each head invariant to all but one FoV, increases OOD robustness.
terfactual images, such that every classifier relies on only a single one of those factors. The mainidea is illustrated in Figure 1. By exploiting concepts from causality, this paper links two previously
distinct domains: disentangled generative models and robust classification. This allows us to scale
our experiments beyond small toy datasets typically used in either domain. The main contributionsof our work are as follows:• We present an approach for generating high-quality counterfactual images with direct control over shape, texture, and background. Supervision is only provided by the class label
and certain inductive biases we impose on the learning problem.
• We demonstrate the usefulness of the generated counterfactual images for the downstreamtask of image classification on both MNIST and ImageNet. Our model improves the classifier’s out-of-domain robustness while only marginally degrading its overall accuracy.
• We show that our generative model demonstrates interesting emerging properties, such as
generating high-quality binary object masks and unsupervised image inpainting.
We release our code at https://github.com/autonomousvision/counterfactual generative networks

2

S TRUCTURAL C AUSAL M ODELS FOR I MAGE G ENERATIONIn this section, we first introduce our ideas on a conceptual level. Concretely, we form a connection
between the areas of causality, disentangled representation learning, and invariant classifiers, andhighlight that domain randomization (Tobin et al., 2017) is a particular instance of these ideas. In
section 3, we will then formulate a concrete model that implements these ideas for image classification. Our goals are two-fold: (i) We aim at generating counterfactual images with previously unseen
combinations like a cat with elephant texture or the proverbial ”bull in a china shop.” (ii) We utilize
these images to train a classifier invariant to chosen factors of variation.
In the following, we first formalize the problem setting we address. Second, we describe how we canaddress this setting by structuring a generator network as a structural causal model (SCM). Third,
we show how to use the SCM for training robust classifiers.
2.1

P ROBLEM S ETTING

Consider a dataset comprised of (high-dimensional) observations x (e.g. images), and correspondinglabels y (e.g. classes). A common assumption is that each x can be described by lower-dimensional,
semantically meaningful factors of variation z (e.g., color or shape of objects in the image). If we
can disentangle these factors, we are able to control their influence on the classifier’s decision. In
the disentanglement literature, the factors are often assumed to be statistically independent, i.e., z is
distributed according to p(z) = Πni=1 (zi ) (Locatello et al., 2018). However, assuming independence
is problematic because certain factors might be correlated in the training data, or the combination ofsome factors may not exist. Consider the colored MNIST dataset (Kim et al., 2019), where both thedigit’s color and its shape correspond to the label. The simplest decision rule a classifier can learn
is to count the number of pixels of a specific color value; no notion of the digit’s shape is required.
This kind of correlation is not limited to constructed datasets – classifiers trained on ImageNet (Denget al., 2009) strongly rely on texture for classification, significantly more than on the object’s shape(Geirhos et al., 2018). While texture or color is a powerful classification cue, we do not want the2

Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2021

classifier to ignore shape information completely. Therefore, we advocate a generative viewpoint.
However, simply training, e.g., a disentangled VAE (Higgins et al., 2017) on this dataset, does notallow for generating data points of unseen combinations – the VAE cannot generate green zeros if
all zeros in the training data are red (see Appendix A for a visualization). We therefore propose anovel generative model which enables full control over several FoVs relevant for classification. We
then train a classifier on these images while randomizing all factors but one. The classifier focuseson the non-randomized factor and becomes invariant wrt. the randomized ones.
2.2

S TRUCTURAL C AUSAL M ODELSIn representation learning, it is commonly assumed that a potentially complex function f generates
images from a small set of high-level semantic variables (e.g., position or color of objects) (Bengio
et al., 2013). Most previous work (Goyal et al., 2019; Suter et al., 2019) imposes no restrictions on
f , i.e., a neural network is trained to map directly from a low-dimensional latent space to images.
We follow the argument that rather than training a monolithic network to map from a latent space
to images, the mapping should be decomposed into several functions. Each of these functions isautonomous, e.g., we can modify the background of an image while keeping all other aspects of theimage unchanged. These demands coincide with the concept of structural causal models (SCMs) andindependent mechanisms (IMs). An SCM C is defined as a collection of d (structural) assignments
Sj := fj (PAj , Uj ) , j = 1, . . . , d(1)where each random variable Sj is a function of its parents PAj ⊆ {S1 , . . . , Sd } \ {Sj } and anoise variable Uj . The noise variables U1 , . . . , Ud are jointly independent. The functions fi are
independent mechanisms, intervening on one mechanism fj does not change the other mechanisms{f1 , . . . , fd }\ {fj }. The SCM C defines a unique distribution over the variables S = (S1 , . . . , Sd )which is referred to as the entailed distribution PSC . If one or more structural assignments are˜ k , Ũk ), this is called an intervention. We consider the case of atomic
replaced, i.e., Sk := f˜(PA˜˜interventions, when f (PAk , Ũk ) puts a point mass on a real value a. The entailed distribution thenC;do(Sk :=a)changes to the intervention distribution PS, where the do refers to the intervention. A
thorough review of these concepts can be found in (Peters et al., 2017). Our goal is to represent
the image generation process with an SCM. If we learn a sensible set of IMs, we can intervene
on a subset of them and generate interventional images xIV . These images were not part of theC;do(Sk :=a)training data x as they are generated from the intervention distribution PS. To generate
a set of counterfactual images xCF , we fix the noise u and randomly draw a, hence answeringcounterfactual questions such as ”How would this image look like with a different background?”.
In our case, a corresponds to a class label that we provide as input, denoted as yCF in the following.
2.3

T RAINING AN I NVARIANT C LASSIFIER

To train an invariant classifier, we generate counterfactual images xCF , by intervening on all fj
simultaneously. Towards this goal, we draw labels uniformly from the set of possible labels Y foreach fj , i.e., each IM is conditioned on a different label. We denote the domain of images generated
by all possible label permutations as XCF . The task of the invariant classifier r : XCF → YCF,kis then to predict the label yCF,k that was provided to one specific IM fk – rendering r invariant
wrt. all other IMs. This type of invariance is reminiscent of the idea of domain randomization(Tobin et al., 2017). Here, the goal is to solve a robotics task while randomizing all task-irrelevant
attributes. The randomization improves the performance of the learned policy in the real-world. In
domain randomization, we commonly assume access to the true generative model (the simulator).
This assumption is not feasible if we do not have access to this model. Similar connections of
causality and data augmentation have been made in (Ilse et al., 2020). It is also possible to train on
interventional images xIV , i.e., generating a single image per sampled noise vector. Empirically, we
find that counterfactual images improve performance over interventional ones. We hypothesize thatcounterfactuals provide a more stable signal.

3

C OUNTERFACTUAL G ENERATIVE N ETWORKSIn this section, we apply our ideas outlined above to the particular problem of image classification.
Our goal is to decompose the image generation process into several IMs. In image classification,3

Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2021

CGN

BigGANU2-NetBigGANBigGANBigGANU2-NetcGAN

Figure 2: Counterfactual Generative Network (CGN). Here, we illustrate the architecture used forthe ImageNet experiments. The CGN is split into four mechanisms, the shape mechanism fshape , thetexture mechanism ftext , the background mechanism fbg , and the composer C. Components withtrainable parameters are blue, components with fixed parameters are green. The primary supervision
is provided by an unconstrained conditional GAN (cGAN) via the reconstruction loss Lrec . The
cGAN is only used for training, as indicated by the dotted lines. Each mechanism takes as input thenoise vector u (sampled from a spherical Gaussian) and the label y (drawn uniformly from the setof possible labels Y) and minimizes its respective loss (Lshape , Ltext , and Lbg ). To generate a setof counterfactual images, we sample u and then independently sample y for each mechanism.
there is generally one principal object in the image. Hence, we assume three IMs for this specifictask: object shape, object texture, and background. Our goal is to train the generator consisting ofthese mechanisms in an end-to-end manner. The inherent structure of the model allows us to generatemeaningful counterfactuals by construction. In the following, we describe the inductive biases weuse (network architectures, losses, pre-trained models) and how to train the invariant classifier. We
refer to the entire generative model using IMs as a Counterfactual Generative Network (CGN).
3.1

I NDEPENDENT M ECHANISMS

We assume the causal structure to be known, and consider three learned IMs for generating shape,
texture, and background, respectively. The only difference between the MNIST variants and ImageNet is the background mechanism. For the MNIST variants, we can simplify the SCM to include
a second texture mechanism instead of a dedicated background mechanism. There is no need for a
globally coherent background in the MNIST setting. An explicit formulation of both SCM is shownin Appendix B. In both cases, the learned IMs feed into another, fixed, IM: the composer. An
overview of our CGN is shown in Figure 2. All IM-specific losses are optimized jointly end-to-end.
For the experiments on ImageNet, we initialize each IM backbone with weights from a pre-trained
BigGAN-deep-256 (Brock et al., 2018), the current state-of-the-art for conditional image generation. BigGAN has been trained as a single monolithic function; hence, it cannot generate images of
only texture or only background, since these would be outside of the training domain.
Composition Mechanism. The function of the composer is not learned but defined analytically. For
this work, we build on common assumptions from compositional image synthesis (Yang et al., 2017)and deploy a simple image formation model. Given the generated masks, textures and backgrounds,
we composite the image xgen using alpha blending, denoted as C:
xgen = C(m, f , b) = m

f + (1 − m)b(2)where m is the mask (or alpha map), f is the foreground, and b is the background. The operator
denotes elementwise multiplication. While, in general, IMs may be stochastic (Eq. 1), we did
not find this to be necessary for the composer; therefore, we leave this mechanism deterministic.
This fixed composition is a strong inductive bias in itself – the generator needs to generate realistic
images through this bottleneck. To optimize the composite image, we could use an adversarial loss
between real and composite images. While applicable to simple datasets such as MNIST, we foundthat an adversarial approach does not scale well to more complex datasets like ImageNet. To get astronger and more stable supervisory signal, we, therefore, use an unconstrained, conditional GAN
4

Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2021

(cGAN) to generate pseudo-ground-truth images xgt from noise u and label y. We feed the sameu and y into the IMs to generate xgen and minimize a reconstruction loss Lrec (xgt , xgen ). We
find a combination of L1 loss and perceptual loss (Johnson et al., 2016) to work well. Note thatduring training, we utilize the same noise u and label y to reconstruct the image generated by thecGAN. However, at inference time, we generate counterfactual images by randomizing both u andy separately per mechanism.
Shape Mechanism. We model the shape using a binary mask predicted by shape IM fshape , where
0 corresponds to the background and 1 to the object. Effectively, this mechanism implements foreground segmentation. The loss is comprised of two terms: Lbinary and Lmask . Lbinary is the pixelwise binary entropy of the mask; hence, minimizing it forces the output to be close to either 0 or 1.
Lmask prohibits trivial solutions, i.e., masks with all 0’s or 1’s that are outside of a defined interval(see Appendix C for details). As we utilize a BigGAN backbone for our ImageNet-Experiments, weneed to extract a binary mask from the backbone’s output. Therefore, we add a pre-trained U2-Net(Qin et al., 2020) as a head on top of the BigGAN backbone. The U2-Net was trained for salient
object detection on DUTS-TR (10553 images) (Wang et al., 2017). Hence, it is class agnostic; it
generates an object mask for a salient object in the image. While the U2-Net presents a strong bias
towards binary object masks, it does not fully solve the task at hand as it captures non-class specificparts (e.g., parts of trees in an elephant-class picture, see Figure 5). By fine-tuning the BigGAN
backbone, we learn to generate images of the relevant part with exaggerated features to increasesaliency. We refer to these as pre-masks m̃.
Texture Mechanism. The texture mechanism ftext is responsible for generating the foregroundobject’s appearance, while not capturing any object shape or background cues. For MNIST, we use
an architectural bias – an additional layer before the final output. This layer spatially divides its input
into patches and randomly rearranges them, similar to a shuffled sliding puzzle. This conceptuallysimple idea does not work on ImageNet, as we want to preserve local object structure, e.g., theposition of an eye. We, therefore, sample patches from the full composite image and concatenate
them into a grid. We denote this patch grid as pg. The patches are sampled from regions where themask values are highest (hence, the object is likely located). We then minimize a perceptual loss
between the foreground f (the output of ftext ) and the patchgrid: Ltext (f , pg). Over training, thebackground gradually transforms into object texture, resulting in texture maps, as shown in Figure
5. More details can be found in Appendix C.
Background Mechanism. The background mechanism fbg needs to capture the background’s
global structure while the object must be removed and inpainted realistically. However, we foundthat we cannot use standard inpainting techniques because classical methods (Barnes et al., 2009)
slow down training too much, and deep learning methods (Liu et al., 2018) do not work well on
synthetic data because of the domain shift. Instead, we exploit the same U2-Net as used for the
shape mechanism fshape . Again, we feed the output of the BigGAN backbone through the U2-Net
with fixed weights. However, this time, we minimize the predicted saliency. Over the progress of
training, this leads to the object shrinking and finally disappearing, while the model learns to inpaintthe object region (see Figure 5 and Appendix E). We refer to this loss as Lbg . We attribute this loss’s
success mainly the powerful pre-trained backbone network. BigGAN is already able to generate
objects on realistic backgrounds; it only needs to unlearn the object generation.

3.2

G ENERATING C OUNTERFACTUALS TO T RAIN C LASSIFIERS

After training our CGN, each IM network has learned a class-conditional distribution over shapes,
textures, or backgrounds. By randomizing the label input y and noise u of each network, we cangenerate counterfactual images. The number of possible combinations is the number of classes to thepower of the number of IM’s. For ImageNet, this is 10003 . The amount of possible images is evenlarger since we learn distributions, i.e., we can generate a nearly unlimited variety of shapes, textures,and backgrounds, per class. We train on both real and counterfactual images. For MNIST, morecounterfactual images always increase the test domain results; see the ablation study in Appendix
A.3. On Imagenet, we provide evenly sized batches of real and counterfactual images; i.e., we use
a ratio of 1. A ratio below 1 leads to inferior performance; a ratio above 1 leads to longer training
times without an increase in performance. Similar results were reported for training on BigGAN
samples in Ravuri & Vinyals (2019).
5

Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2021

Generated Counterfactual Images

Real Images

Colored

Double-Colored

Wildlife

Colored

Double-Colored

Wildlife

Figure 3: MNISTs. Left: Samples of the different MNIST variations (for brevity, we show only the
first four classes). Right: Counterfactual samples generated by our CGN. Note that the CGN learnedclass-conditional distributions, i.e., it generates varying shapes, colors, and textures.

4

E XPERIMENTS

Our experiments aim to answer the following questions: (i) Does our approach reliably learn thedisentangled IMs on datasets of different complexity? (ii) Which inductive biases are necessary toachieve this? (iii) Do counterfactual images enable training invariant classifiers? We first apply ourapproach to different versions of MNIST: colored-, double-colored- and Wildlife-MNIST (details
about their generation are in Appendix A.2). The label is encoded in the digit shape, foregroundcolor or texture, and the background color or texture, see Figure 3. Our work focuses on a setting
where the spurious signal is a strong predictor of the label; hence we assume a correlation strengthof at least 90 % between signal and label in our simulated environments. This assumption is in linewith latest related work on visual bias (Goyal et al., 2019; Wang et al., 2020), which considers astrong correlation to be above 95 %. We then scale our approach to ImageNet and demonstrate that
we can improve the robustness of ImageNet classifiers. Implementation details about architectures,loss parameters, and hyperparameters can be found in Appendix C.
4.1

D OES OUR APPROACH LEARN THE DISENTANGLED INDEPENDENT MECHANISMS ?

Standard metrics like the Inception Score (IS) (Salimans et al., 2016) are not applicable since thecounterfactual images are outside of the natural image domain. We thus focus on qualitative resultsin this section. For a quantitative analysis, we refer the reader to Section 4.3 where we analyze theaccuracy, robustness, and invariance of classifiers trained on the generated counterfactual data.
MNISTs. The generated counterfactual images are shown in Figure 3 (right). None of the counterfactual combinations were present in the training data. We can see that CGN successfully generates
high-quality counterfactuals. The results on Wildlife MNIST are surprisingly good, considering thatthe object texture is only observable on the relatively thin digits. Nevertheless, the texture IM learns
to generate realistic textures. All experiments on MNIST are done without pre-training any network.
ImageNet. As shown in Figure 4, our CGN generates counterfactuals of high visual fidelity. We
train a single CGN for all 1000 classes. We also find an unexpected benefit of our approach. In someinstances, the composite images eliminate structural artifacts of the original BigGAN images, suchas surplus legs, as shown in Figure 5. We hypothesize that fshape learns a general shape concept
per class, resulting in outliers, like elephants with eight legs, being smoothed out. We show more
samples, individual IM outputs, and interpolations in Appendix D. The CGN can fail to produce
high-quality texture maps for very small objects, e.g., for a bird high up in the sky, the texture map
will still show large portions of the sky. Also, in some instances, a residue of the object is left on
the background, e.g., a dog snout. For generating counterfactual images, this is not a problem asa different object will cover the residue. Lastly, the enforced constraints can lead to a reduction
in realism of the composite images xgen compared to the original BigGAN samples. We show
examples and propose solutions for these problems in Appendix F.
4.2

W HICH INDUCTIVE BIASES ARE NEEDED TO ACHIEVE DISENTANGLEMENT ?

We employ two kinds of biases: pre-training of modules and IM-specific losses. We find that pretraining is not necessary for our experiments on MNIST. However, when scaling to ImageNet, powerful pre-trained models are key for achieving good results. Furthermore, this allows to train the6

Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2021

Shape

red winecottontail rabbit

pirate ship

triumphal archmushroomhyena dog

Texturecarbonara

head cabbage

bananaIndian elephantbarrelschool bus

Backgroundbaseballvalleybittern (bird)

viaduct

grey whale

snorkelFigure 4: ImageNet Counterfactuals. The CGN successfully learns the disentangled shape, texture,and background mechanisms, and enables the generation of numerous permutations thereof.

Figure 5: Individual IM Outputs over Training. We show pre-masks m̃, masks m, foregrounds f ,and backgrounds b. The arrows indicate the beginning and end of the training. The initial output ofthe pre-trained models is gradually transformed while the composite image only marginally changes.
whole CGN on a single NVIDIA GTX 1080Ti within 12 hours, in contrast to BigGAN, which wastrained on a Google TPU v3 Pod with 512 cores for up to 48 hours. To investigate each loss’ influence, we disable one loss at a time and measure its influence on the quality of the composite images.
The composite images are on the image manifold, hence, we can calculate their Inception score (IS).
As we train with pseudo ground truth, the performance of the unconstrained BigGAN is a natural
upper bound. The used model reaches an IS of 202.9. To measure if the CGN collapsed during
training, we monitor the mean value of the generated mask µmask . A µmask close to 1 means thatftext is not training. Instead, it generates the output of the pre-trained BigGAN, hence, a mask of
1’s trivially minimizes the reconstruction loss Lrec (xgt , xgen ). The same is true for µmask close to
0 and fbg . The results in Table 1 indicate that each loss is necessary, and jointly optimizing all ofthem end-to-end is needed for a high IS without a collapse of µmask . Removing Lshape , leads to bad
quality masks (non-binary, only partially capturing the object). This results in a low IS since object
texture and background get mixed in the composited image. Not using either Ltext or Lbg results
in a high IS (as the output is close to the original BigGAN output), but a collapse of µmask . The
mechanisms do not disentangle their respective signal. Finally, disabling Lrec leads to a very low
IS, since the IMs can optimize their respective loss without any constraint on the composite image.
We show the evolution and collapse of the masks over training in Appendix G.
4.3

D O COUNTERFACTUAL IMAGES ENABLE T RAINING OF I NVARIANT C LASSIFIERS ?

The following experiments investigate if we can instill invariance into a classifier. We perform
experiments on the MNIST variants, a cue-conflict dataset, and an OOD version of ImageNet.
MNIST Classification. In the training domain, shapes, colors, and textures are correlated with theclass label. In the test domain, only the shapes correspond to the correct class. We compare to current
approaches for training invariant classifiers: IRM (Arjovsky et al., 2019) and Learning-not-to-learn(LNTL) (Kim et al., 2019). For a detailed description we refer to Appendix C. Original + CGN is
additionally trained on counterfactual data to predict the input labels of the shape IM. Original +GAN is a baseline that is trained on real and generated, non-counterfactual samples. IRM considers
a signal to be causal if it is stable across several environments. We train IRM on 2 environments (90% and 100 % correlation) or 5 environments (90 %, 92.5 %, 95 %, 97.5 %, and 100% correlation).
LNTL considers color to be spurious, whereas we assume (complementary) that shapes are causal.
Alternatively, we can follow the same assumption as IRM with an additional causal identification
7

Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2021

Lshape

Ltext

Lbg

Lrec

IS ⇑

µmask

7
3
3
3
3

3
7
3
3
3

3
3
7
3
3

3
3
3
7
3

85.9
198.4
195.6
38.39
130.2

0.2 ± 0.2 %0.9 ± 0.1 %0.1 ± 0.1 %0.3 ± 0.2 %0.3 ± 0.2%

BigGAN (Upper Bound)

202.9

-

Table 1: Loss Ablation Study. We
turn off one loss at a time. Values
indicating mask collapse are red.

colored MNIST
Train Acc ⇑ Test Acc ⇑Original
IRM (2 Envs)
IRM (5 Envs)
LNTL
Original + GAN
Original + CGN

99.5 %
99.6 %
99.3 %
99.8 %
99.7 %

35.9 %
59.8 %
81.8 %
40.7 %
95.1 %

double-colored MNIST
Train Acc ⇑ Test Acc ⇑100.0 %
100.0 %
99.9 %
98.7 %
100.0 %
97.4 %

Wildlife MNIST
Train Acc ⇑ Test Acc ⇑100.0 %
99.9 %
99.8 %
99.9 %
100.0 %
99.2 %

10.3 %
67.7 %
78.9 %
69.9 %
10.8 %
89.0 %

10.1 %
11.3 %
76.8 %
11.5 %
10.4 %
85.7 %

Table 2: MNISTs Classification. In the test set, colors andtextures are randomized, only the digit’s shape corresponds tothe class label. Random performance is at 10%.

Trained on

Shape Bias

top-1 IN Acc ⇑top-5 IN Acc ⇑IN
SIN
IN + SIN

21.39 %
81.37 %
34.65 %

76.13 %
60.18 %
74.59 %

92.86 %
82.62 %
90.03 %IN + CGN/ShapeIN + CGN/Text
IN + CGN/Bg

54.82 %
16.67 %
22.89 %

73.98 %

91.71 %

Table 3: Shape vs. Texture. We can control
the classifier’s shape or texture preference.

Top-1 Test Accuracies
Trained on

IN-9 ⇑

Mixed-Same ⇑Mixed-Rand ⇑BG-Gap ⇓IN
SIN
IN + SIN
Mixed-Rand
IN + CGN

95.6%
89.2 %
94.7 %
73.3%
94.2 %

86.2%
73.1 %
85.9 %
71.5%
83.4 %

78.9%
63.7 %
78.5 %
71.3%
80.1 %

7.3%
9.4 %
7.4 %
0.2 %
3.3 %

Table 4: Accuracies on IN-9. The reported accuracies are all obtained using a Resnet-50.

step, see Appendix H. The results in Table 2 confirm that training on counterfactual data leads toclassifiers that are invariant to the spurious signals. We hypothesize that the difference between
environments may be hard to pick up for IRM, especially if only a few are available. We find that
we can further improve IRM’s performance by adding more environments. However, continually
increasing the number of environments is an unrealistic premise and only feasible in simulated
environments. Our results indicate that LNTL and IRM have trouble scaling to more complex data.
Texture vs. Shape Bias. The Cue Conflict dataset consists of images generated using iterative styletransfer (Gatys et al., 2015) between a texture and a content image. A high shape bias corresponds
to classification according to the content label and vice versa for texture. Their approach is trainedon stylized ImageNet (SIN), either as a drop-in for ImageNet (IN) or as augmentation. We use
a classifier ensemble, i.e., a classifier with a common backbone and multiple heads, each headinvariant to all but one FoV. We average the predicted log-probabilies of each head for the final
output of the ensemble. We conduct all experiments using a Resnet-50 architecture. As shown in
Table 3, we can influence the individual bias of each classifier head without significant degradationin the ensemble’s performance.
Invariance over Backgrounds. Xiao et al. (2020) propose the BG-Gap to measure a classifier’s
dependence on the background signal. Based on ImageNet-9 (IN-9), a subset of ImageNet with
9 coarse-grained classes, they build synthetic datasets. For Mixed-Rand, the backgrounds are randomized, while the object remains unchanged, hence background an class are decorrelated. For
Mixed-Same they sample class-consistent backgrounds. The BG-Gap is the difference in performance between the two. Training on IN or SIN does not make it possible to disentangle and omit
the background signal, as shown in Table 4. Directly training on Mixed-Rand leads to a drop in performance on the original data which might be due to the smaller training dataset. We can generate
unlimited data of this type, hence, we are able to reduce the gap while achieving high accuracy on
IN-9. However, a gap to a fully invariant classifier remains. We partially attribute this to the generalremaining domain gap between generated and real images.

5

R ELATED W ORK

Our work is related to disentangled representation learning and the training of invariant classifiers.
Disentangled Representation Learning. A recent line of work in image synthesis aims to learn
disentangled features for controlling the image generation process (Chen et al., 2016; Higgins et al.,2017; Liao et al., 2020). The challenge of the task is that the underlying factors can be highly
correlated. Closely related to our work is (Li et al., 2020), which aims to disentangle background,shape, pose, and texture, using object bounding boxes for supervision. Their methods assumes
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Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2021

images of a single object category (e.g. birds). We scale our approach to all classes of ImageNet
which enables us to generate inter-class counterfactuals. A recent research direction explores thediscovery of interpretable directions in GANs trained on ImageNet (Plumerault et al., 2020; Voynov& Babenko, 2020; Peebles et al., 2020). These approaches do not allow for generating counterfactual
images. Kocaoglu et al. (2018) train two separate generative models, one generating binary featurelabels (mustache, young), the other generating images conditioned on these labels. Their model cancreate images of previously unseen combinations of attributes, e.g., women with mustaches. Thisapproach assumes a data set with fine-grained labels; hence it would not be suited to our application
since labels for high-level concepts like shape are hard to obtain. Besserve et al. (2019) also leverage
the idea of independent mechanisms to discover modularity in pre-trained generative models. Theirapproach does not allow for direct control of image attributes. Lastly, methods for causal generativemodeling utilizing competing experts (von Kügelgen et al., 2020) have been demonstrated on toy
datasets only. Further, none of the works above aim to use the generated images to improve upon adownstream task such as image classification.
Invariant Classification. Current approaches do not take an underlying causal model into account.
Instead, they rely on different assumptions. Arjovsky et al. (2019) assume that the training datais collected into separate environments (e.g. different measurement circumstances). Correlations
that are stable across environments are considered to be causal. Kim et al. (2019) aim to learn features that are uninformative of a given bias (spurious) signal. As mentioned above, attaining labels
for shape or texture is expensive and not straight-forward. A recent strand of work is concernedwith data augmentation for improving invariance against spurious correlations. Shetty et al. (2020)
propose to train object detectors on generated semantic adversarial data, effectively reducing the texture dependency of their model. Their finding is in line with (Geirhos et al., 2018) that proposes totransfer the style of paintings onto images and use them for data augmentation. These approaches,
however, do not allow to choose the specific signal we want invariance for, e.g., the background.
The use of counterfactual data has been previously explored in natural language inference (Kaushik
et al., 2020) and visual question answering (Teney et al., 2020).

6

D ISCUSSION

We assume that an image can be neatly distinguished into a class foreground and backgroundthroughout this work. This assumption breaks once we consider more complex scenes with different object instances or for tasks without a clear foreground-background distinction, e.g., in medical
images. The composition mechanism is a powerful bias, and crucial to making our model work.
In other domains, equally strong biases may need to be identified to enable learning the SCM. An
exciting research direction is to explore different configurations of IMs to tackle these challenges.
The additional constraints that we enforce during the CGN training lead to a reduced realism, as
evidenced by the lower IS. We also find that our generated images can significantly influence aclassifier’s preference, but their quality is not high enough to improve performance on ImageNet.
However, even state-of-the-art generative models (with higher IS) are not good enough yet to generate data for training competitive ImageNet classifiers (Ravuri & Vinyals, 2019).
Lastly, in our experiments, we assume the causal structure to be known. This assumption is substantially stronger than the ones in more general standard disentanglement frameworks (Chen et al.,2016; Higgins et al., 2017). A possible extension to our work could leverage causal discovery toisolate IMs in a domain-agnostic manner, e.g., via meta-learning (Bengio et al., 2020). On the other
hand, the definition of a causal structure and the approximation through IMs may be a principled
way to integrate domain knowledge into a machine learning system, The need for better interfaces
to integrate domain knowledge has recently been highlighted in (D’Amour et al., 2020).

7

C ONCLUSION

In this work, we apply ideas from causality to generative modeling and the training of invariant classifiers. We structure a generative network into independent mechanisms to generate counterfactual
images useful for training classifiers. With the use of several inductive biases, we demonstrate ourapproach on various MNIST variants as well as ImageNet. Our ideas are orthogonal to advances ingenerative modeling - with advances therein, our obtained results will further improve.
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Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2021

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We acknowledge the financial support by the BMWi in the project KI Delta Learning (project number 19A19013O). Andreas Geiger was supported by the ERC Starting Grant LEGO-3D (850533).
We would like to thank Yiyi Lao, Michael Niemeyer, and Elie Aljalbout for comments on an earlier
paper draft and Songyou Peng, Michael Oechsle, and Kashyap Chitta for last-minute proofreading.
We would also like to thank Vanessa Sauer for her general support and constructive criticism on thegenerated counterfactuals in earlier stages.

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A PPENDIX A
A.1

MNIST VARIANTS

VARIATIONAL AUTOENCODERS ON C OLORED MNIST

Figure 6 shows the latent space of a β-VAE (Higgins et al., 2017) trained on colored MNIST. The
VAE disentangles the data into different clusters present in the data. However, the axes do notcorrespond to color and shape, i.e., color and shape vary when traversing one latent. We used
only two latent dimensions for visualization purposes; the problem is not resolved by adding moredimensions. The same behaviour can be observed for unconstrained GANs (Goodfellow et al.,2014), as a GAN also approximates the training distribution.

Figure 6: Colored MNIST. (left) Examples of data points. (right) Training a disentangled VAE with
two latent dimensions on colored MNIST.
A.2

MNIST S G ENERATION

Colored MNIST. This dataset was proposed by Kim et al. (2019). They select ten distinct colors
and assign each of them to a class. For each training image, they sample a color from a normal
distribution with the class color as the mean. In the test set, the colors are randomly assigned. The
variance σ of the normal distribution can be used to control the amount of bias. We evaluate on thehardest, i.e., most biased, setting with σ = 0.02.
Double-Colored MNIST. We follow the same procedure as for colored MNIST. We additionallyencode the class label in the background color.
Wildlife MNIST. To build a version of MNIST closer to an ImageNet setting, we add a texturebias to the data. We follow the same procedure as for double-colored MNIST. We take texturesfrom (Cimpoi et al., 2014) and use ten images of the texture class ”striped” to encode the label inthe foreground. Similarly, we encode the label in the background with textures of the texture class”veiny.” We do not add noise to texture to add stochasticity. Instead, we sample a 32x32 patch fromthe larger texture image. The textures are multi-modal; hence, these patches can look quite different.
A.3

A BLATION S TUDIESIn Figure 7, we study the effects of the number of counterfactual data points on the test accuracy. We
increase the amount of counterfactual data while the amount of real data is fixed (50k for MNIST).
We also ablate the amount of counterfactual drawn per sampled noise u. We find that the higher
the number of counterfactual data points, the better. Also, it is advantageous to draw several counterfactuals per u. Our intuition is that several counterfactuals provide a more stable signal of thenon-spurious factor.

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Figure 7: MNIST Ablation Study. To improve visibility, we start with 104 counterfactual data
points, below the performance is marginally better than the fully biased baseline. The CF ratio indicates how many counterfactuals we generate per sampled noise. For colored MNIST, the maximum
CF ratio is ten as there are only ten possible colors per shape.

A PPENDIX B

C AUSAL S TRUCTURES

The two SCM’s are as follows:
MNISTsImageNetM := fshape (Y1 , U1 )F := ftext,1 (Y2 , U2 )B := ftext,2 (Y3 , U3 )Xgen := C(M, F, B)

M := fshape (Y1 , U1 )F := ftext (Y2 , U2 )B := fbg (Y3 , U3 )Xgen := C(M, F, B)

where M is the mask, F is the foreground, B is the background, Uj is the exogenous noise, Yj isthe class label, Xgen is the generated image, and fj and C are the independent mechanisms.

A PPENDIX C
C.1

I MPLEMENTATION D ETAILSS HAPE L OSS D ETAILSThe full shape loss is as follows:
Lshape (fs ) = Lbinary (fs ) + Lmask (fs )"N#
X= Ep(u,y)−mi log2 (mi ) − (1 − mi ) ∗ log2 (1 − mi )

(3)

i=1

"
+ Ep(u,y) max 0, τ −

N
X

1
mi
N i=1

!
+ max 0,NX

1
mi − τ
N i=1!#

where Lbinary is the pixel-wise binary entropy, Lmask is the mask loss, m = fshape (u, y) is themask generated by fshape and τ is a scalar threshold. Lbinary enforces the output to be close toeither 0 or 1. Lmask prohibits trivial solutions, i.e., masks with all 0’s or 1’s, that are outside theinterval defined by τ . We set τ = 0.1 in all experiments. A τ of 0.1 means that µmask is forced to
be in the interval of [0.1, 0.9] – the main object should occupy more than 10% and less than 90% of
the image.
C.2

T EXTURE L OSS D ETAILSThe sampling procedure for Ltext is as follows: we sample 36 patches of size 15 × 15 from theregions where the mask is closest to 1. Out of these 36 patches, we build a 6 × 6 patch grid. Finally,
we upscale the grid to the full 256 × 256 resolution; we denote this grid as pg. We then minimize aperceptual loss between the foreground f (the output of ftext ) and the patchgrid: Ltext (f , pg).
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C.3

CGN T RAINING ON I MAGE N ET.

Training Settings. For training the CGN, we jointly optimize the following loss:
L = Lrec + Lshape + λ5 Ltext + λ6 Lbg= λ1 LL1 + λ2 Lperc + λ3 Lbinary + λ4 Lmask + λ5 Ltext + λ6 Lbg(4)

We use the following lambdas: λ1 = 100, λ2 = 5, λ3 = 300, λ4 = 500, λ5 = 5, λ6 = 2000. For
the optimization we use Adam (Kingma & Ba, 2014), and set the learning rate of fshape to 8e-6,
and for both ftext and fbg to 1e-5. We do not use real data for training the CGN so we do not needto any data loading. We sample a single image from BigGAN and the CGN and accumulate the loss
gradients for 4000 steps before taking a gradient step. Accumulating large pseudo-batches proved
crucial for high-quality gradients, confirming the observations of (Brock et al., 2018). Further,using a batch size of one makes it possible to train on a single GPU. For the perceptual losses, i.e.,
Lperc and Ltext , we use pre-trained VGG16 with batch normalization layers. We calculate the stylereconstruction loss (Johnson et al., 2016) of the features after the first four max-pooling layers.
We use the pre-trained BigGAN models from https://github.com/huggingface/pytorch-pretrained-BigGAN. We experiment with different values for the truncation valueof the truncated normal distribution used to sample the input noise. However, we find it does not
impact the performance of the CGN. Also, a low value leads to worse performance of the trainedclassifiers; hence, we leave the truncation value at 1.
Hyperparameter Search. We measure the Inception score (IS) during training and the mean valueof the masks µmask to detect mask collapse. We also observe the generated images for a fixed noise
vector; see the outputs in Figure 5. Our overall objective is a high IS and a stable µmask . Further, we
aim for high-quality output of all IMs (Masks: binary, capture only class-specific parts; Textures: nobackground/global shape visible, Background: no trace of foreground objects visible). We observe
these outputs for several classes during optimization. The hyperparameters can be tuned mostly
independently from each other, i.e., a better lambda for the mask loss does not influence the qualityof the texture maps much.
C.4

C LASSIFIER T RAINING

MNIST. We use the same CNN architecture for all experiments and approaches. For IRM, we
produce versions of double-colored MNIST and Wildlife MNIST with different degree of correlation
between the label and the foreground colors/textures and background colors/textures. We then train
IRM on 2 environments (90% and 100% correlation) or 5 environments (90%, 92.5%, 95%, 97.5%,
and 100% correlation). We schedule the gradient norm penalty weight, starting from 0, then linearly
increasing it over the training episodes. We find the scheduling to be crucial for IRM to converge
and achieve good performance.
ImageNet. We use a ResNet-50 from PyTorch torchvision. We share the weight up to thelast layer as a common backbone and add three fully-connected heads (shape, texture, background).
Each of the heads is provided its respective label when training on the counterfactual images. On
the real images, we average the logits of all heads. This approach allows the single classifiers tofocus on its assigned FoV while the ensemble performs well overall. Similarly to the experimentsby (Geirhos et al., 2018), we begin the training with pre-trained weights from ImageNet. We train
for 70 episodes with Stochastic Gradient Descent using a batch size of 512. Of the 512 images,
256 are real images, 256 are counterfactual images. We find that an even ratio between real andcounterfactual images leads to the best results in terms of optimization stability and performance.
We use a momentum of 0.9, weight decay (1e-4), and a learning rate of 0.1, multiplied by a factorof 0.001 after 30 and 60 epochs.

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A PPENDIX D
D.1

M ORE S AMPLES AND I NTERPOLATIONSI NDIVIDUAL IM O UTPUTS FOR DIFFERENT CLASS TYPESIn the following we illustrate the individual outputs of each IM for different classes. In each figure,
we show from top to bottom: pre-masks m̃, masks m, texture maps f , backgrounds b, and composite
images xgen . For all shown outputs, we set the truncation parameter for the noise to 0.5.

Figure 8: IM Outputs for ’jay’. From top tobottom: m̃, m, f , b, xgen .

Figure 9: IM Outputs for ’wallaby’. From top
to bottom: m̃, m, f , b, xgen .

Figure 10: IM Outputs for ’king penguin’.
From top to bottom: m̃, m, f , b, xgen .

Figure 11: IM Outputs for ’vizsla’. From top
to bottom: m̃, m, f , b, xgen .

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Figure 12: IM Outputs for ’barn’. From top tobottom: m̃, m, f , b, xgen .

Figure 13: IM Outputs for ’speedboat’. From
top to bottom: m̃, m, f , b, xgen .

Figure 14: IM Outputs for ’viaduct’. From top
to bottom: m̃, m, f , b, xgen .

Figure 15: IM Outputs for ’cauliflower’.
From top to bottom: m̃, m, f , b, xgen .

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Figure 16: IM Outputs for ’bell pepper’.
From top to bottom: m̃, m, f , b, xgen .

Figure 17: IM Outputs for ’strawberry’.
From top to bottom: m̃, m, f , b, xgen .

Figure 18: IM Outputs for ’geyser’. From top
to bottom: m̃, m, f , b, xgen .

Figure 19: IM Outputs for ’agaric’. From top
to bottom: m̃, m, f , b, xgen .

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D.2

L ATENT I NTERPOLATIONS
Indiancobra

ostrichsubmarine

commodetriumphalarchmudturtleunicycle

American
eagle

wine
bottletripodforkliftaircraftcarrier

Figure 20: Interpolating Shapes. We interpolate between u and y pairs.

winebottlepillbottlepizza

pomegranate

cheetahmilitary
uniformjack-o'lanterncauliflower

trench coatking
penguinmonarchbutterfly

Frenchloaf

Figure 21: Interpolating Textures. We interpolate between u and y pairs.

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water
ouzel

fig

sandbarviaduct

axolotl

Airedaleterriermushroomvalleycliff

mud turtle

grey whale

coral reef

Figure 22: Interpolating Backgrounds. We interpolate between u and y pairs.

D.3

M ORE C OUNTERFACTUAL S AMPLES

Figure 23: MNIST Counterfactuals. From Left to Right: colored, double-colored-, and Wildlife
MNIST.

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Row

ColumnShape

TextureBackground

Row

ColumnShape

TextureBackground1

1

school bus

panda

geyser3

4

offshore rig

ambulance

breakwater1

2

hyena dogchellostrawberry

35mushroom

sand viper

ostrich

1

3

robin

lipstick

diving4

1snowmobile

French Loaf

Arabian camel

1

4

Indian cobra

analog clock

green lizard

4

2

katamaran

cheetahgarden spider

1

5

race carpiggy bank

fig

4

3

bald eagle

strawberry

spike

2

1

hyena dogbreastplate

cock

4

4

triumphal arc

standard poodle

bullfrog2

2

German shepherd

king penguin

bittern

4

5forklifttheater curtain

valley2

3

beakerbusby

pineapple

51

whine bottle

pill bottle

alp

2

4

Indian Cobra

orangespider web

5

2

pirate ship

trench coatbeaver

2

5

teddy

beer glassrock crab

53submarine

race car

hay

3

1

malinoisreelviaduct

5

4

wood rabbit

jack-o'-lanternwater ouzel

3

2

ibex

upright pianosand bank5

5

teapotmilitary uniform

baseball3

3

hourglasslemon

hornbill

Figure 24: ImageNet Counterfactuals. Top: Counterfactual Images. Bottom: ImageNet labels.

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Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2021

A PPENDIX EIM OUTPUTS OVER THE COURSE OF TRAINING

In the following we illustrate the individual outputs of each IM over the course of training. In eachfigure, we show from top to bottom: pre-masks m̃, masks m, texture maps f , backgrounds b, andcomposite images xgen .

Figure 25: IM Outputs over Training for ’dalmatian’ The arrows indicate the beginning and endof the training.

Figure 26: IM Outputs over Training for ’cauliflower’ The arrows indicate the beginning and endof the training.

Figure 27: IM Outputs over Training for ’castle’ The arrows indicate the beginning and end of
the training.

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Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2021

Figure 28: IM Outputs over Training for ’ringtailed lemur’ The arrows indicate the beginningand end of the training.

Figure 29: IM Outputs over Training for ’mushroom’ The arrows indicate the beginning and endof the training.

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Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2021

A PPENDIX FFAILURE C ASES OF CGN

Figure 30: Texture-Background Entanglement. For relatively small objects, the texture maps canstill show traces of the background. A possible remedy would be to choose the patch size for Ltext
dependent on the relative object size.

Figure 31: Background Residues. Especially for large objects, i.e., where large regions need to be
in-painted, there can be faint artifacts visible. For the composite images, this is not a problem as an
object will cover the residue.

Figure 32: Reduced Realism. As evidence by the lower IS, the generated images xgen are generally
lower in realism. This reduced realism is due to the constraints that we enforce and the simplified
composition mechanism. A solution might be to add a shallow refinement network after the composer.

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Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2021

A PPENDIX GC OLLAPSING M ASKS

Figure 33: Masks when disabling different losses. From left to right: the beginning of training,training without Lshape , training without Ltext , training without Lbg , training with all losses. The
third and fourth columns show the collapse of the masks, as described in section 4.2.

A PPENDIX HCGN AUGMENTATION WITH IRM ASSUMPTIONS

We can drop the assumption of a priori knowledge of the causal signal and follow the same assumption as IRM: several environments with varying correlations, an invariant signal is considered causal.
In the following, we train a CGN on double-colored MNIST. We then generate counterfactual datato train three classifiers:• Shape classifier (SC): invariant wrt. object color and background color• Object color classifier (OCC): invariant wrt. object shape and background color• Background color classifier (BCC): one invariant wrt. object shape and object color
We can measure their respective performance in the environments used to train IRM. In these environments, only the shape is stably correlated with the label; the foreground and background color
vary in their degree of correlation. Based on the results in Table 5, we can determine the shape to be
the causal signal as only the test accuracy of SC is stable across environments.
Degree of Correlation

Accuracy SC [%]Accuracy OCC [%]Accuracy BCC [%]

90 %
95 %
100 %

85.05 ± 0.12
85.08 ± 0.07
85.14 ± 0.10

58.72 ± 0.67
62.69 ± 0.58
65.05 ± 1.32

82.47 ± 0.13
87.96 ± 0.12
90.16 ± 0.13

Table 5: Test Accuracy on double-colored MNIST. We report the mean and standard deviation
over three random seeds.

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