Learning explanations that are hard to vary
Authors: Giambattista Parascandolo, Alexander Neitz, Antonio Orvieto, Luigi Gresele, Bernhard Schölkopf
Venue: ICLR 2021 Poster
Keywords: invariances, consistency, gradient alignment
Abstract: In this paper, we investigate the principle that good explanations are hard to vary in the context of deep learning.
We show that averaging gradients across examples -- akin to a logical OR of patterns -- can favor memorization and `patchwork' solutions that sew together different strategies, instead of identifying invariances.
To inspect this, we first formalize a notion of consistency for minima of the loss surface, which measures to what extent a minimum appears only when examples are pooled.
We then propose and experimentally validate a simple alternative algorithm based on a logical AND, that focuses on invariances and prevents memorization in a set of real-world tasks. 
Finally, using a synthetic dataset with a clear distinction between invariant and spurious mechanisms, we dissect learning signals and compare this approach to well-established regularizers.