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Related papers: Removing Spurious Features can Hurt Accuracy and A…

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A major challenge to out-of-distribution generalization is reliance on spurious features -- patterns that are predictive of the class label in the training data distribution, but not causally related to the target. Standard methods for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-21 Shikai Qiu , Andres Potapczynski , Pavel Izmailov , Andrew Gordon Wilson

Identifying spurious correlations learned by a trained model is at the core of refining a trained model and building a trustworthy model. We present a simple method to identify spurious correlations that have been learned by a model trained…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-12-07 Misgina Tsighe Hagos , Kathleen M. Curran , Brian Mac Namee

Predictive models -- learned from observational data not covering the complete data distribution -- can rely on spurious correlations in the data for making predictions. These correlations make the models brittle and hinder generalization.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Khurram Javed , Martha White , Yoshua Bengio

Neural networks trained on real-world data often exhibit biases while simultaneously being vulnerable to privacy attacks aimed at extracting sensitive information. Despite extensive research on each problem individually, their intersection…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Chenxiang Zhang , Jun Pang , Sjouke Mauw

Modern machine learning models are prone to over-reliance on spurious correlations, which can often lead to poor performance on minority groups. In this paper, we identify surprising and nuanced behavior of finetuned models on worst-group…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Tyler LaBonte , John C. Hill , Xinchen Zhang , Vidya Muthukumar , Abhishek Kumar

Image classifiers often use spurious patterns, such as "relying on the presence of a person to detect a tennis racket, which do not generalize. In this work, we present an end-to-end pipeline for identifying and mitigating spurious patterns…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-19 Gregory Plumb , Marco Tulio Ribeiro , Ameet Talwalkar

Deep learning models often achieve high performance by inadvertently learning spurious correlations between targets and non-essential features. For example, an image classifier may identify an object via its background that spuriously…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Guangtao Zheng , Wenqian Ye , Aidong Zhang

Spurious correlations threaten the validity of statistical classifiers. While model accuracy may appear high when the test data is from the same distribution as the training data, it can quickly degrade when the test distribution changes.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-21 Zhao Wang , Aron Culotta

Shortcut mitigation strategies commonly rely on training data annotations, group-balanced held-out data or the presence of all groups, i.e., all combinations of (spurious) attributes and classes, in the training data. However, these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Phuong Quynh Le , Jörg Schlötterer , Sari Sadiya , Gemma Roig , Christin Seifert

Fine-tuning a pretrained language model on a curated dataset can produce spurious correlations between the fine-tuning task and unintended latent factors -- such as misaligned personas or political slant -- that the curation procedure has…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-28 Ciarán M. Gilligan-Lee , Joseph Egan , Yuchen Zhu , Michael O'Riordan

The paradigm of worst-group loss minimization has shown its promise in avoiding to learn spurious correlations, but requires costly additional supervision on spurious attributes. To resolve this, recent works focus on developing weaker…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-06 Junhyun Nam , Jaehyung Kim , Jaeho Lee , Jinwoo Shin

While deep learning models have shown remarkable performance in various tasks, they are susceptible to learning non-generalizable spurious features rather than the core features that are genuinely correlated to the true label. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Yihe Deng , Yu Yang , Baharan Mirzasoleiman , Quanquan Gu

Spurious correlations occur when a model learns unreliable features from the data and are a well-known drawback of data-driven learning. Although there are several algorithms proposed to mitigate it, we are yet to jointly derive the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-23 Gautam Sreekumar , Vishnu Naresh Boddeti

Neural networks trained with (stochastic) gradient descent have an inductive bias towards learning simpler solutions. This makes them highly prone to learning spurious correlations in the training data, that may not hold at test time. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-08 Yu Yang , Eric Gan , Gintare Karolina Dziugaite , Baharan Mirzasoleiman

Supervised learning methods have been found to exhibit inductive biases favoring simpler features. When such features are spuriously correlated with the label, this can result in suboptimal performance on minority subgroups. Despite the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-06-28 Kimia Hamidieh , Haoran Zhang , Swami Sankaranarayanan , Marzyeh Ghassemi

To address the problem of NLP classifiers learning spurious correlations between training features and target labels, a common approach is to make the model's predictions invariant to these features. However, this can be counter-productive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-22 Parikshit Bansal , Amit Sharma

Deep neural networks have been shown to learn and rely on spurious correlations present in the data that they are trained on. Reliance on such correlations can cause these networks to malfunction when deployed in the real world, where these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Varun Mulchandani , Jung-Eun Kim

Recent work has raised concerns on the risk of spurious correlations and unintended biases in statistical machine learning models that threaten model robustness and fairness. In this paper, we propose a simple and intuitive regularization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-05 Zhao Wang , Kai Shu , Aron Culotta

Deep neural networks can be unreliable in the real world especially when they heavily use {\it spurious} features for their predictions. Focusing on image classifications, we define {\it core features} as the set of visual features that are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-29 Sahil Singla , Soheil Feizi

Models trained with empirical risk minimization (ERM) are known to learn to rely on spurious features, i.e., their prediction is based on undesired auxiliary features which are strongly correlated with class labels but lack causal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-11 Phuong Quynh Le , Jörg Schlötterer , Christin Seifert