Spuriosity Rankings: Sorting Data for Spurious Correlation Robustness

We present a framework for ranking images within their class based on the strength of spurious cues present. By measuring the gap in accuracy on the highest and lowest ranked images (we call this spurious gap), we assess spurious feature reliance for $89$ diverse ImageNet models, finding that even the best models underperform in images with weak spurious presence. However, the effect of spurious cues varies far more dramatically across classes, emphasizing the crucial, often overlooked, class-dependence of the spurious correlation problem. While most spurious features we observe are clarifying (i.e. improving test-time accuracy when present, as is typically expected), we surprisingly find many cases of confusing spurious features, where models perform better when they are absent. We then close the spurious gap by training new classification heads on lowly ranked (i.e. without common spurious cues) images, resulting in improved effective robustness to distribution shifts (ObjectNet, ImageNet-R, ImageNet-Sketch). We also propose a second metric to assess feature reliability, finding that spurious features are generally less reliable than non-spurious (core) ones, though again, spurious features can be more reliable for certain classes. To enable our analysis, we annotated $5,000$ feature-class dependencies over {\it all} of ImageNet as core or spurious using minimal human supervision. Finally, we show the feature discovery and spuriosity ranking framework can be extended to other datasets like CelebA and WaterBirds in a lightweight fashion with only linear layer training, leading to discovering a previously unknown racial bias in the Celeb-A hair classification.