Related papers: Counterfactual Invariance to Spurious Correlations…
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…
Despite alarm over the reliance of machine learning systems on so-called spurious patterns, the term lacks coherent meaning in standard statistical frameworks. However, the language of causality offers clarity: spurious associations are due…
Despite the success of machine learning applications in science, industry, and society in general, many approaches are known to be non-robust, often relying on spurious correlations to make predictions. Spuriousness occurs when some…
Spurious correlations are a threat to the trustworthiness of natural language processing systems, motivating research into methods for identifying and eliminating them. However, addressing the problem of spurious correlations requires more…
Deep learning models are known to often learn features that spuriously correlate with the class label during training but are irrelevant to the prediction task. Existing methods typically address this issue by annotating potential spurious…
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.…
The predictions of text classifiers are often driven by spurious correlations -- e.g., the term `Spielberg' correlates with positively reviewed movies, even though the term itself does not semantically convey a positive sentiment. In this…
Stress testing poses a causal question: how would portfolio credit losses change if the macroeconomy followed an adverse counterfactual path? Yet standard practice remains predictive and might be therefore vulnerable to omitted-variable…
Learning models have been shown to rely on spurious correlations between non-predictive features and the associated labels in the training data, with negative implications on robustness, bias and fairness. In this work, we provide a…
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…
We consider one of the most basic multiple testing problems that compares expectations of multivariate data among several groups. As a test statistic, a conventional (approximate) $t$-statistic is considered, and we determine its rejection…
Among the most critical limitations of deep learning NLP models are their lack of interpretability, and their reliance on spurious correlations. Prior work proposed various approaches to interpreting the black-box models to unveil the…
In many classification datasets, the task labels are spuriously correlated with some input attributes. Classifiers trained on such datasets often rely on these attributes for prediction, especially when the spurious correlation is high, and…
Counterfactual inference is a useful tool for comparing outcomes of interventions on complex systems. It requires us to represent the system in form of a structural causal model, complete with a causal diagram, probabilistic assumptions on…
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…
Models that learn spurious correlations from training data often fail when deployed in new environments. While many methods aim to learn invariant representations to address this, they often underperform standard empirical risk minimization…
Models driven by spurious correlations often yield poor generalization performance. We propose the counterfactual (CF) alignment method to detect and quantify spurious correlations of black box classifiers. Our methodology is based on…
Deep learning models in medical imaging often fail when deployed in new clinical environments due to distribution shifts in demographics, scanner hardware, or acquisition protocols. A central challenge is underspecification, where models…
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.…
Causal models bring many benefits to decision-making systems (or agents) by making them interpretable, sample-efficient, and robust to changes in the input distribution. However, spurious correlations can lead to wrong causal models and…