Shifts: A Dataset of Real Distributional Shift Across Multiple Large-Scale Tasks

While much research has been done on developing methods for improving robustness to distributional shift and uncertainty estimation, limited work has examined developing standard datasets and benchmarks for assessing these approaches. Moreover, most of these methods were developed only for small-scale regression or image classification tasks. However, many tasks of practical interest have different modalities, such as tabular data, audio, text, or sensor data, which offer significant challenges involving regression and discrete or continuous structured prediction. Given the current state of the field, a standardized large-scale dataset of tasks across a range of modalities affected by distributional shifts is necessary. This will enable researchers to meaningfully evaluate the plethora of recently developed uncertainty quantification methods, assessment criteria and baselines. In this work, we propose the \emph{Shifts Dataset} for evaluation of uncertainty estimates and robustness to distributional shift. The dataset, which has been collected from industrial sources and services, is composed of three tasks, with each corresponding to a particular data modality: tabular weather prediction, machine translation, and self-driving car (SDC) vehicle motion prediction. All of these data modalities and tasks are affected by real, `in-the-wild' distributional shifts and pose interesting challenges with respect to uncertainty estimation.