Enhancing Representation Learning with Deep Classifiers in Presence of Shortcut

A deep neural classifier trained on an upstream task can be leveraged to boost the performance of another classifier in a related downstream task through the representations learned in hidden layers. However, presence of shortcuts (easy-to-learn features) in the upstream task can considerably impair the versatility of intermediate representations and, in turn, the downstream performance. In this paper, we propose a method to improve the representations learned by deep neural image classifiers in spite of a shortcut in upstream data. In our method, the upstream classification objective is augmented with a type of adversarial training where an auxiliary network, so called lens, fools the classifier by exploiting the shortcut in reconstructing images. Empirical comparisons in self-supervised and transfer learning problems with three shortcut-biased datasets suggest the advantages of our method in terms of downstream performance and/or training time.