# Data Models for Dataset Drift Controls in Machine Learning With Optical Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.02578 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.02578/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 83 of its 183 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 83)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Intriguing properties of neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6199/) (2013)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Dropout as a Bayesian Approximation: Representing Model Uncertainty in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02142/) (2015)
- [Simple and Scalable Predictive Uncertainty Estimation using Deep Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01474/) (2016)
- [Deep Learning Face Attributes in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7766/) (2014)
- [Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10196/) (2017)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis: Finding Sparse, Trainable Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03635/) (2018)
- [Shortcut Learning in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07780/) (2020)
- [Do ImageNet Classifiers Generalize to ImageNet?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10811/) (2019)
- [A Simple Unified Framework for Detecting Out-of-Distribution Samples and Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03888/) (2018)
- [MixMatch: A Holistic Approach to Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02249/) (2019)
- [WILDS: A Benchmark of in-the-Wild Distribution Shifts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07421/) (2020)
- [Certified Adversarial Robustness via Randomized Smoothing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.02918/) (2019)
- [Distributionally Robust Neural Networks for Group Shifts: On the Importance of Regularization for Worst-Case Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08731/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Data Augmentation for Consistency Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12848/) (2019)
- [Adversarial Examples Are Not Bugs, They Are Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02175/) (2019)
- [AugMix: A Simple Data Processing Method to Improve Robustness and Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02781/) (2019)
- [What Makes for Good Views for Contrastive Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10243/) (2020)
- [A Gentle Introduction to Conformal Prediction and Distribution-Free Uncertainty Quantification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07511/) (2021)
- [RobustBench: a standardized adversarial robustness benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.09670/) (2020)
- [Recognition in Terra Incognita](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.04975/) (2018)
- [Learning to See in the Dark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01934/) (2018)
- [Measuring Robustness to Natural Distribution Shifts in Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00644/) (2020)
- [Do Deep Generative Models Know What They Don't Know?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.09136/) (2018)
- [Improving robustness against common corruptions by covariate shift adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16971/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [DiffInfinite: Large Mask-Image Synthesis via Parallel Random Patch Diffusion in Histopathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13384/) (2023)
- [DMLR: Data-centric Machine Learning Research -- Past, Present and Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13028/) (2023)
- [A Sustainable AI Economy Needs Data Deals That Work for Generators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.09966/) (2026)
- [Localized Data Work as a Precondition for Data-Centric ML: A Case Study of Full Lifecycle Crop Disease Identification in Ghana](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01767/) (2023)
- [Making the Discrete Continuous: Synthetic RAW Augmentations for Fine-Grained Evaluation of Person Detection Performance in Low Light](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.22455/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Camera images are ubiquitous in machine learning research. They also play a central role in the delivery of important services spanning medicine and environmental surveying. However, the application of machine learning models in these domains has been limited because of robustness concerns. A primary failure mode are performance drops due to differences between the training and deployment data. While there are methods to prospectively validate the robustness of machine learning models to such dataset drifts, existing approaches do not account for explicit models of the primary object of interest: the data. This limits our ability to study and understand the relationship between data generation and downstream machine learning model performance in a physically accurate manner. In this study, we demonstrate how to overcome this limitation by pairing traditional machine learning with physical optics to obtain explicit and differentiable data models. We demonstrate how such data models can be constructed for image data and used to control downstream machine learning model performance related to dataset drift. The findings are distilled into three applications. First, drift synthesis enables the controlled generation of physically faithful drift test cases to power model selection and targeted generalization. Second, the gradient connection between machine learning task model and data model allows advanced, precise tolerancing of task model sensitivity to changes in the data generation. These drift forensics can be used to precisely specify the acceptable data environments in which a task model may be run. Third, drift optimization opens up the possibility to create drifts that can help the task model learn better faster, effectively optimizing the data generating process itself. A guide to access the open code and datasets is available at https://github.com/aiaudit-org/raw2logit.