Out-of-Distribution Generalization via Risk Extrapolation (REx)
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Distributional shift is one of the major obstacles when transferring machine learning prediction systems from the lab to the real world. To tackle this problem, we assume that variation across training domains is representative of the variation we might encounter at test time, but also that shifts at test time may be more extreme in magnitude. In particular, we show that reducing differences in risk across training domains can reduce a model’s sensitivity to a wide range of extreme distributional shifts, including the challenging setting where the input contains both causal and anti-causal elements. We motivate this approach, Risk Extrapolation (REx), as a form of robust optimization over a perturbation set of extrapolated domains (MM-REx), and propose a penalty on the variance of training risks (V-REx) as a simpler variant. We prove that variants of REx can recover the causal mechanisms of the targets, while also providing some robustness to changes in the input distribution (``covariate shift''). By appropriately trading-off robustness to causally induced distributional shifts and covariate shift, REx is able to outperform alternative methods such as Invariant Risk Minimization in situations where these types of shift co-occur.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it