About Me

Learning Beyond Spurious Correlations

I am Yibo Zhou (周亦博), Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence from Beihang University (June 2026). My doctoral advisor was Prof. Hai-Miao Hu. My research connects identifiability and computational limits, shortcut-resistant evaluation, and balanced representation learning. I study when models can recover task-relevant structure rather than rely on misleading statistical regularities. Across these directions, I examine what data can identify, what algorithms can recover, and what evaluations can verify, with applications to trustworthy computer vision, out-of-distribution detection, and pedestrian attribute recognition.

News

Jun 2026

Outstanding Graduate of Beijing

北京市优秀毕业生

Oct 2025

National Scholarship

国家奖学金

  • Oct 2026
    Preprint & Code

    Counterfactual Pairing Cycles — The arXiv preprint of our NeurIPS 2026 paper is available, together with the official implementation.

  • 2026
    NeurIPS 2026

    Three papers accepted — One first-author paper and two corresponding-author papers, covering counterfactual pairing, label-only auditing, and source calibration.

  • Jun 2026
    ICML 2026

    Is Spurious Correlation Removal Always Learnable? — The preprint of our ICML 2026 paper is available on arXiv.

Earlier publication updates
  • Apr 2025
    IEEE TPAMI

    Heterogeneous Feature Re-sampling — Our work on balanced pedestrian attribute recognition appears in the April 2025 issue of IEEE TPAMI.

  • Mar 2025
    IJCV

    Co-occurrence Bias: Theory, Algorithms, and Improvements — Our journal article on robust pedestrian attribute recognition is published online in IJCV.

  • Jul 2024
    ICML 2024

    Label-balanced Multi-label Learning — Our paper on independent attribute balancing appears in the ICML 2024 proceedings.

  • Aug 2023
    IJCAI 2023

    Attribute Disentanglement — Our work on co-occurrence bias appears in the IJCAI 2023 proceedings, with a Long Oral presentation.

  • Jun 2022
    CVPR 2022

    Reconstruction-based OOD Detection — My sole-author work on reconstruction-based out-of-distribution detection appears in the CVPR 2022 proceedings.

Selected Publications

Complete author lists are available on the linked paper pages. Click a figure to enlarge it.

IEEE TPAMI 2025

Heterogeneous Feature Re-sampling for Balanced Pedestrian Attribute Recognition

Yibo Zhou First author

IEEE TPAMI 2025 · Published

Balance attributes independently in feature space.

Research summary

Feature re-sampled detached learning balances each attribute without distorting the label priors of co-occurring attributes. Gradient-oriented augment translating further addresses feature noise and semantic imbalance, combining independent balancing and augmentation with minimal computational overhead.

IJCV 2025

A Solution to Co-occurrence Bias in Pedestrian Attribute Recognition: Theory, Algorithms, and Improvements

Yibo Zhou First author

IJCV 2025 · Published

Learn attribute-specific evidence instead of unstable co-occurrence shortcuts.

Research summary

Attribute-disentangled feature learning minimizes information shared across attribute-specific representations. This journal study extends the co-occurrence-bias framework with improved feature-space exploration, treatment of imbalance, and flexibility to preserve selected causal dependencies.

CVPR 2022

Rethinking Reconstruction display_order: 60-Based Out-of-Distribution Detection

Yibo Zhou Sole author

CVPR 2022 · Published ESI Highly Cited Paper

Reconstruction difficulty is not the same as distributional novelty.

Research summary

A quadruplet domain-translation analysis characterizes the limitations of reconstruction error as an OOD signal. Semantic reconstruction, certainty decomposition, and distance normalization improve detection without additional data or sacrificing known-class classification accuracy.

ICML 2024

Pedestrian Attribute Recognition as Label-balanced Multi-label Learning

Yibo Zhou First author

ICML 2024 · Published

Decouple label balancing from attribute co-occurrence.

Research summary

Feature-level re-sampling makes independent label balancing feasible despite image-level attribute co-occurrence. Bayesian feature augmentation adds in-distribution diversity for under-represented attributes, addressing label imbalance and semantic imbalance together.

IJCAI 2023

A Solution to Co-occurrence Bias: Attributes Disentanglement via Mutual Information Minimization for Pedestrian Attribute Recognition

Yibo Zhou First author

IJCAI 2023 · Published Long Oral

Recognize each attribute from its own visual evidence.

Research summary

Mutual-information minimization discourages attribute representations from encoding other attributes. Efficient feature transformation and recombination reduce reliance on dataset-specific co-occurrences and improve robustness under identity and scene shifts.

ICML 2026

Is Spurious Correlation Removal Always Learnable?

Yibo Zhou First author

ICML 2026 · Accepted

Statistical identifiability does not guarantee efficient recovery.

Research summary

This work separates statistical identification from computational recovery in invariant learning through a conditional computational barrier. It also quantifies how environment diversity controls identifiability, estimation difficulty, and phase transitions, connecting theoretical limits with empirical diversity diagnostics.

NeurIPS 2026

Can the Parts Fool the Test? Counterfactual Pairing Cycles for Relational OOD

Yibo Zhou First author

NeurIPS 2026 · Accepted

Keep the components fixed to isolate evidence about their pairing.

Research summary

Counterfactual pairing cycles reuse the same two images and two captions while changing only their assignment. The balanced contrast cancels image-only, text-only, and additive component shortcuts exactly, providing an evaluation primitive, a training loss, and a diagnostic for relational OOD.

NeurIPS 2026

What Can Labels Alone Audit and Edit in Frozen Representations?

Yibo Zhou Corresponding author

NeurIPS 2026 · Accepted

Preserve the label-sufficient quotient before attempting residual edits.

Research summary

Labels identify a posterior quotient, rather than an arbitrary semantic/background decomposition. This motivates quotient-first auditing and editing of frozen representations. A structured second-order specialization yields dual-moment decomposition; residual editing is useful only in regimes with sufficient residual signal, support, and split stability.

NeurIPS 2026

Can Metadata Fix the Gauge? Calibration Turns Sparse Multi-Source Learning from Sparse PCA into Sparse Mean Recovery

Yibo Zhou Corresponding author

NeurIPS 2026 · Accepted

Valid calibration metadata can restore first-order signal across sources.

Research summary

Source labels do not reveal how different sources orient their coordinates. In a sparse Gaussian model, relative-gauge metadata enables synchronization and changes the learning problem from sparse PCA to sparse mean recovery. Aligned mass quantifies the statistical value of calibration, with computational consequences under sparse-PCA hardness assumptions.

Patent Application

CN 117115851 A — A Pedestrian Attribute Recognition Method for Complex Surveillance Scenarios.

Education

Beihang University

Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence

September 2022 – June 2026

University of California San Diego

M.S. in Electrical Engineering

August 2017 – May 2019

Lanzhou University

B.S. in Materials Physics

August 2013 – June 2017

Professional Experience

OPPO Guangdong Mobile Telecommunications Corp., Ltd.
Artificial Intelligence Algorithm Engineer
101 Laboratory · Imaging Algorithm Development Department
July 2019 – June 2021 · Shenzhen, China

publication list

Automatically synchronized from my arXiv author profile. Journal-only publications may not appear in this list. View on arXiv ↗

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