[2411.15272] Curriculum-enhanced GroupDRO: Challenging the Norm of Avoiding Curriculum Learning in Subpopulation Shift Setups

Computer Science > Machine Learning arXiv:2411.15272 (cs) [Submitted on 22 Nov 2024 (v1), last revised 4 Mar 2026 (this version, v2)] Title:Curriculum-enhanced GroupDRO: Challenging the Norm of Avoiding Curriculum Learning in Subpopulation Shift Setups Authors:Antonio Barbalau View a PDF of the paper titled Curriculum-enhanced GroupDRO: Challenging the Norm of Avoiding Curriculum Learning in Subpopulation Shift Setups, by Antonio Barbalau View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:In subpopulation shift scenarios, a Curriculum Learning (CL) approach would only serve to imprint the model weights, early on, with the easily learnable spurious correlations featured. To the best of our knowledge, none of the current state-of-the-art subpopulation shift approaches employ any kind of curriculum. To overcome this, we design a CL approach aimed at initializing the model weights in an unbiased vantage point in the hypothesis space which sabotages easy convergence towards biased hypotheses during the final optimization based on the entirety of the available data. We hereby propose a Curriculum-enhanced Group Distributionally Robust Optimization (CeGDRO) approach, which prioritizes the hardest bias-confirming samples and the easiest bias-conflicting samples, leveraging GroupDRO to balance the initial discrepancy in terms of difficulty. We benchmark our proposed method against the most popular subpopulation shift datasets, showing an increase over the state-of-the-art results across all sce...