Preprint Open access
When Masking Helps or Hurts Robustness in Compressed CLIP: A Pre-Deployment Diagnostic
This paper demonstrate that whether masking-based token pruning helps or hurts worst-group robustness can be predicted before deployment, without labels or fine-tuning. A systematic study of semantic masking across 8 spurious-correlation benchmarks shows its effect on worst-group accuracy is highly unstable: it improve …