# FOCUS: Familiar Objects in Common and Uncommon Settings

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.03804 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.03804/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Oct 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Deep Learning Face Attributes in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7766/) (2014)
- [Wide Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07146/) (2016)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [Searching for MobileNetV3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02244/) (2019)
- [Shortcut Learning in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07780/) (2020)
- [The Many Faces of Robustness: A Critical Analysis of Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16241/) (2020)
- [Natural Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07174/) (2019)
- [BDD100K: A Diverse Driving Dataset for Heterogeneous Multitask Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04687/) (2018)
- [Recognition in Terra Incognita](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.04975/) (2018)
- [Noise or Signal: The Role of Image Backgrounds in Object Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09994/) (2020)
- [Counterfactual Generative Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06046/) (2021)
- [Leveraging Sparse Linear Layers for Debuggable Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04857/) (2021)
- [Inside-Outside Net: Detecting Objects in Context with Skip Pooling and Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04143/) (2015)
- [Understanding Failures of Deep Networks via Robust Feature Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.01750/) (2020)
- [3DB: A Framework for Debugging Computer Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03805/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Is Synthetic Data all We Need? Benchmarking the Robustness of Models Trained with Synthetic Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20469/) (2024)
- [Explicit Tradeoffs between Adversarial and Natural Distributional Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07592/) (2022)
- [Invariant Learning via Diffusion Dreamed Distribution Shifts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10370/) (2022)
- [AnySynth: Harnessing the Power of Image Synthetic Data Generation for Generalized Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16749/) (2024)
- [Data-Centric Debugging: mitigating model failures via targeted data collection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09859/) (2022)
- [Identifying and Mitigating Model Failures through Few-shot CLIP-aided Diffusion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05464/) (2023)
- [DIAGen: Semantically Diverse Image Augmentation with Generative Models for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14584/) (2024)
- [Low-Biased General Annotated Dataset Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10831/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Standard training datasets for deep learning often contain objects in common settings (e.g., "a horse on grass" or "a ship in water") since they are usually collected by randomly scraping the web. Uncommon and rare settings (e.g., "a plane on water", "a car in snowy weather") are thus severely under-represented in the training data. This can lead to an undesirable bias in model predictions towards common settings and create a false sense of accuracy. In this paper, we introduce FOCUS (Familiar Objects in Common and Uncommon Settings), a dataset for stress-testing the generalization power of deep image classifiers. By leveraging the power of modern search engines, we deliberately gather data containing objects in common and uncommon settings in a wide range of locations, weather conditions, and time of day. We present a detailed analysis of the performance of various popular image classifiers on our dataset and demonstrate a clear drop in performance when classifying images in uncommon settings. By analyzing deep features of these models, we show that such errors can be due to the use of spurious features in model predictions. We believe that our dataset will aid researchers in understanding the inability of deep models to generalize well to uncommon settings and drive future work on improving their distributional robustness.