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

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The performance of visual quality prediction models is commonly assumed to be closely tied to their ability to capture perceptually relevant image aspects. Models are thus either based on sophisticated feature extractors carefully designed…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-06-11 Sören Becker , Thomas Wiegand , Sebastian Bosse

The term `spurious correlations' has been used in NLP to informally denote any undesirable feature-label correlations. However, a correlation can be undesirable because (i) the feature is irrelevant to the label (e.g. punctuation in a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-26 Nitish Joshi , Xiang Pan , He He

Spurious correlations are brittle associations between certain attributes of inputs and target variables, such as the correlation between an image background and an object class. Deep image classifiers often leverage them for predictions,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Guangtao Zheng , Wenqian Ye , Aidong Zhang

Often machine learning models tend to automatically learn associations present in the training data without questioning their validity or appropriateness. This undesirable property is the root cause of the manifestation of spurious…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-17 Preetam Prabhu Srikar Dammu , Chirag Shah

Due to their powerful feature association capabilities, neural network-based computer vision models have the ability to detect and exploit unintended patterns within the data, potentially leading to correct predictions based on incorrect or…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-05 Solha Kang , Esla Timothy Anzaku , Wesley De Neve , Arnout Van Messem , Joris Vankerschaver , Francois Rameau , Utku Ozbulak

Natural language understanding (NLU) models tend to rely on spurious correlations (i.e., dataset bias) to achieve high performance on in-distribution datasets but poor performance on out-of-distribution ones. Most of the existing debiasing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-09-14 Shihan Dou , Rui Zheng , Ting Wu , SongYang Gao , Junjie Shan , Qi Zhang , Yueming Wu , Xuanjing Huang

Recent years have witnessed the great success of self-supervised learning (SSL) in recommendation systems. However, SSL recommender models are likely to suffer from spurious correlations, leading to poor generalization. To mitigate spurious…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-04-19 Xinyu Lin , Yiyan Xu , Wenjie Wang , Yang Zhang , Fuli Feng

An important line of research in the field of explainability is to extract a small subset of crucial rationales from the full input. The most widely used criterion for rationale extraction is the maximum mutual information (MMI) criterion.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Wei Liu , Zhiying Deng , Zhongyu Niu , Jun Wang , Haozhao Wang , YuanKai Zhang , Ruixuan Li

Coreset selection methods have shown promise in reducing the training data size while maintaining model performance for data-efficient machine learning. However, as many datasets suffer from biases that cause models to learn spurious…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Amaya Dharmasiri , William Yang , Polina Kirichenko , Lydia Liu , Olga Russakovsky

Backgrounds in images play a major role in contributing to spurious correlations among different data points. Owing to aesthetic preferences of humans capturing the images, datasets can exhibit positional (location of the object within a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Mishal Fatima , Steffen Jung , Margret Keuper

Datasets typically contain inaccuracies due to human error and societal biases, and these inaccuracies can affect the outcomes of models trained on such datasets. We present a technique for certifying whether linear regression models are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-09 Anna P. Meyer , Aws Albarghouthi , Loris D'Antoni

In text classification tasks, models often rely on spurious correlations for predictions, incorrectly associating irrelevant features with the target labels. This issue limits the robustness and generalization of models, especially when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Yuqing Zhou , Ziwei Zhu

While most machine learning models can provide confidence in their predictions, confidence is insufficient to understand a prediction's reliability. For instance, the model may have a low confidence prediction if the input is not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Mert Yuksekgonul , Linjun Zhang , James Zou , Carlos Guestrin

Instance features in images exhibit spurious correlations with background features, affecting the training process of deep neural classifiers. This leads to insufficient attention to instance features by the classifier, resulting in…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-12-30 Xuewei Li , Zhenzhen Nie , Mei Yu , Zijian Zhang , Jie Gao , Tianyi Xu , Zhiqiang Liu

Recently, the enactment of privacy regulations has promoted the rise of the machine unlearning paradigm. Existing studies of machine unlearning mainly focus on sample-wise unlearning, such that a learnt model will not expose user's privacy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-19 Tao Guo , Song Guo , Jiewei Zhang , Wenchao Xu , Junxiao Wang

Spurious correlations that degrade model generalization or lead the model to be right for the wrong reasons are one of the main robustness concerns for real-world deployments. However, mitigating these correlations during pre-training for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-01 Yu Yang , Besmira Nushi , Hamid Palangi , Baharan Mirzasoleiman

Gender bias in vision-language foundation models (VLMs) raises concerns about their safe deployment and is typically evaluated using benchmarks with gender annotations on real-world images. However, as these benchmarks often contain…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Yusuke Hirota , Ryo Hachiuma , Boyi Li , Ximing Lu , Michael Ross Boone , Boris Ivanovic , Yejin Choi , Marco Pavone , Yu-Chiang Frank Wang , Noa Garcia , Yuta Nakashima , Chao-Han Huck Yang

Deep neural classifiers tend to rely on spurious correlations between spurious attributes of inputs and targets to make predictions, which could jeopardize their generalization capability. Training classifiers robust to spurious…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Guangtao Zheng , Wenqian Ye , Aidong Zhang

Selective classification, in which models can abstain on uncertain predictions, is a natural approach to improving accuracy in settings where errors are costly but abstentions are manageable. In this paper, we find that while selective…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-15 Erik Jones , Shiori Sagawa , Pang Wei Koh , Ananya Kumar , Percy Liang

Learning correlations from data forms the foundation of today's machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence research. While contemporary methods enable the automatic discovery of complex patterns, they are prone to failure when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Samuel J. Bell , Skyler Wang