  Importance of visual context in scene understanding tasks is well recognized
in the computer vision community. However, to what extent the computer vision
models for image classification and semantic segmentation are dependent on the
context to make their predictions is unclear. A model overly relying on context
will fail when encountering objects in context distributions different from
training data and hence it is important to identify these dependencies before
we can deploy the models in the real-world. We propose a method to quantify the
sensitivity of black-box vision models to visual context by editing images to
remove selected objects and measuring the response of the target models. We
apply this methodology on two tasks, image classification and semantic
segmentation, and discover undesirable dependency between objects and context,
for example that "sidewalk" segmentation relies heavily on "cars" being present
in the image. We propose an object removal based data augmentation solution to
mitigate this dependency and increase the robustness of classification and
segmentation models to contextual variations. Our experiments show that the
proposed data augmentation helps these models improve the performance in
out-of-context scenarios, while preserving the performance on regular data.
