Distribution Shift in Ecological Data - Generalization vs. Specialization

Explore a 41-minute lecture from MIT's Sara Beery at the Simons Institute examining the critical balance between generalization and specialization in computer vision systems for ecological applications. Delve into the complex tradeoffs between developing general-purpose solutions versus specialized approaches that optimize for specific stakeholder needs, considering factors like cost efficiency, human involvement, and risk assessment. Learn about various methodologies attempting to bridge this gap across different dimensions of data, labels, tasks, and models. Examine the performance of key approaches including task-specific dataset subselection, domain adaptation, expert-in-the-loop retrieval systems, and task-aware compression when applied to real-world ecological benchmarks with varying data modalities and distribution shifts.