Diagnosing and Rectifying Fake OOD Invariance: A Restructured Causal Approach

Abstract

Invariant representation learning (IRL) encourages the prediction from invariant causal features to labels deconfounded from the environments, advancing the technical roadmap of out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization. Despite spotlights around, recent theoretical result verified that some causal features recovered by IRLs merely pretend domain-invariantly in the training environments but fail in unseen domains. The fake invariance severely endangers OOD generalization since the trustful objective can not be diagnosed and existing causal remedies are invalid to rectify. In this paper, we review a IRL family (InvRat) under the Partially and Fully Informative Invariant Feature Structural Causal Models (PIIF SCM /FIIF SCM) respectively, to certify their weaknesses in representing fake invariant features, then, unify their causal diagrams to propose ReStructured SCM (RS-SCM). RS-SCM can ideally rebuild the spurious and the fake invariant features simultaneously. Given this, we further develop an approach based on conditional mutual information with respect to RS-SCM, then rigorously rectify the spurious and fake invariant effects. It can be easily implemented by a small feature selection subnet introduced in the IRL family, which is alternatively optimized to achieve our goal. Experiments verified the superiority of our approach to fight against the fake invariant issue across a variety of OOD generalization benchmarks.