Estimating Example Difficulty using Variance of Gradients

Abstract

In machine learning, a question of great interest is understanding what examples are challenging for a model to classify. Identifying atypical examples ensures the safe de-ployment of models, isolates samples that require further human inspection and provides interpretability into model behavior. In this work, we propose Variance of Gradients (VoG) as a valuable and efficient metric to rank data by difficulty and to surface a tractable subset of the most chal-lenging examples for human-in-the-loop auditing. We show that data points with high VoG scores are far more difficult for the model to learn and over-index on corrupted or mem-orized examples. Further, restricting the evaluation to the test set instances with the lowest VoG improves the model's generalization performance. Finally, we show that VoG is a valuable and efficient ranking for out-of-distribution detection.