title: Learning explanations that are hard to vary
abstract: In this paper, we investigate the principle that good explanations are hard to vary in the context of deep learning.
  We show that averaging gradients across examples -- akin to a logical OR of patterns -- can favor memorization and `patchwork' solutions that sew together different strategies, instead of identifying invariances.
  To inspect this, we first formalize a notion of consistency for minima of the loss surface, which measures to what extent a minimum appears only when examples are pooled.
  We then propose and experimentally validate a simple alternative algorithm based on a logical AND, that focuses on invariances and prevents memorization in a set of real-world tasks. 
  Finally, using a synthetic dataset with a clear distinction between invariant and spurious mechanisms, we dissect learning signals and compare this approach to well-established regularizers.
authors: Giambattista Parascandolo Alexander Neitz ANTONIO ORVIETO Luigi Gresele Bernhard Schölkopf
hIndex: Bernhard Schölkopf 143