Do Models see Corruption as we see? An Item Response Theory based study in Computer Vision

On a given dataset, some models perform better than others. Can we examine this performance w.r.t. different strata of the dataset rather than just focusing on an aggregate metric (such as accuracy)? Given that noise and corruption are natural in real-world settings, can we study model failure under such scenarios? For a particular corruption type, do some classes become more difficult to classify than others? To answer such fine-grained questions, in this paper, we explore the use of Item Response Theory (IRT) in computer vision tasks to gain deeper insights into the behavior of models and datasets, especially under corruption. We show that incorporating IRT can provide instance-level understanding beyond what classical metrics (such as accuracy) can provide. Our findings highlight the ability of IRT to detect changes in the distribution of the dataset when it is perturbed through corruption, using latent parameters derived from IRT models. These latent parameters can effectively suggest annotation errors, informative images, and class-level information while highlighting the robustness of different models and dataset classes under consideration.