# Fighting Selection Bias in Statistical Learning: Application to Visual Recognition from Biased Image Databases

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.02357 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.02357/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Sep 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [Matching Networks for One Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04080/) (2016)
- [Learning Transferable Features with Deep Adaptation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.02791/) (2015)
- [Learning to Generalize: Meta-Learning for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03463/) (2017)
- [MS-Celeb-1M: A Dataset and Benchmark for Large-Scale Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08221/) (2016)
- [Long-tail learning via logit adjustment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07314/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation with Residual Transfer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.04433/) (2016)
- [Domain Separation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06019/) (2016)
- [Learning Not to Learn: Training Deep Neural Networks with Biased Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.10352/) (2018)
- [Women also Snowboard: Overcoming Bias in Captioning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09797/) (2018)
- [Simultaneous Deep Transfer Across Domains and Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.02192/) (2015)
- [Large Scale Fine-Grained Categorization and Domain-Specific Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.06193/) (2018)
- [Efficient parametrization of multi-domain deep neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10082/) (2018)
- [SpotTune: Transfer Learning through Adaptive Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08737/) (2018)
- [Borrowing Treasures from the Wealthy: Deep Transfer Learning through Selective Joint Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08690/) (2017)
- [Domain Adaptive Transfer Learning with Specialist Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.07056/) (2018)
- [Weighted Empirical Risk Minimization: Sample Selection Bias Correction based on Importance Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05145/) (2020)
- [Statistical Learning from Biased Training Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.12304/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In practice, and especially when training deep neural networks, visual recognition rules are often learned based on various sources of information. On the other hand, the recent deployment of facial recognition systems with uneven performances on different population segments has highlighted the representativeness issues induced by a naive aggregation of the datasets. In this paper, we show how biasing models can remedy these problems. Based on the (approximate) knowledge of the biasing mechanisms at work, our approach consists in reweighting the observations, so as to form a nearly debiased estimator of the target distribution. One key condition is that the supports of the biased distributions must partly overlap, and cover the support of the target distribution. In order to meet this requirement in practice, we propose to use a low dimensional image representation, shared across the image databases. Finally, we provide numerical experiments highlighting the relevance of our approach.