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We introduce a toolkit for uncovering spurious correlations between recording characteristics and target class in speech datasets. Spurious correlations may arise due to heterogeneous recording conditions, a common scenario for…

Deep classifiers are known to rely on spurious features $\unicode{x2013}$ patterns which are correlated with the target on the training data but not inherently relevant to the learning problem, such as the image backgrounds when classifying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-21 Pavel Izmailov , Polina Kirichenko , Nate Gruver , Andrew Gordon Wilson

Neural network classifiers can largely rely on simple spurious features, such as backgrounds, to make predictions. However, even in these cases, we show that they still often learn core features associated with the desired attributes of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-04 Polina Kirichenko , Pavel Izmailov , Andrew Gordon Wilson

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

Recent research has revealed that deep neural networks often take dataset biases as a shortcut to make decisions rather than understand tasks, leading to failures in real-world applications. In this study, we focus on the spurious…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-23 Yanrui Du , Jing Yan , Yan Chen , Jing Liu , Sendong Zhao , Qiaoqiao She , Hua Wu , Haifeng Wang , Bing Qin

Deep learning has seen widespread success in various domains such as science, industry, and society. However, it is acknowledged that certain approaches suffer from non-robustness, relying on spurious correlations for predictions.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Xiaoling Zhou , Wei Ye , Rui Xie , Shikun Zhang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-09 Sergei Volodin , Nevan Wichers , Jeremy Nixon

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

Neural networks pose a privacy risk due to their propensity to memorise and leak training data. We show that unique features occurring only once in training data are memorised by discriminative multi-layer perceptrons and convolutional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-23 John Hartley , Sotirios A. Tsaftaris

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-05-05 Jacob Eisenstein

The problem of spurious correlations (SCs) arises when a classifier relies on non-predictive features that happen to be correlated with the labels in the training data. For example, a classifier may misclassify dog breeds based on the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-06-13 Aengus Lynch , Gbètondji J-S Dovonon , Jean Kaddour , Ricardo Silva

Neural networks pose a privacy risk to training data due to their propensity to memorise and leak information. Focusing on image classification, we show that neural networks also unintentionally memorise unique features even when they occur…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-06 John Hartley , Sotirios A. Tsaftaris

Deep neural networks often exploit *spurious* features that are present in the majority of examples within a class during training. This leads to *poor worst-group test accuracy*, i.e., poor accuracy for minority groups that lack these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-18 Siddharth Joshi , Yu Yang , Yihao Xue , Wenhan Yang , Baharan Mirzasoleiman

Spurious correlations are a major source of errors for machine learning models, in particular when aiming for group-level fairness. It has been recently shown that a powerful approach to combat spurious correlations is to re-train the last…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-24 Humza Wajid Hameed , Geraldin Nanfack , Eugene Belilovsky

Neural networks often exhibit simplicity bias, favoring simpler features over more complex ones, even when both are equally predictive. We introduce a novel method called imbalanced label coupling to explore and extend this simplicity bias…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Zhehang Du

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has emerged as a powerful technique for learning rich representations from unlabeled data. The data representations are able to capture many underlying attributes of data, and be useful in downstream…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-01 Weicheng Zhu , Sheng Liu , Carlos Fernandez-Granda , Narges Razavian

Spurious correlations are everywhere. While humans often do not perceive them, neural networks are notorious for learning unwanted associations, also known as biases, instead of the underlying decision rule. As a result, practitioners are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-01 Moritz Vandenhirtz , Laura Manduchi , Ričards Marcinkevičs , Julia E. Vogt

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

Neural NLP models tend to rely on spurious correlations between labels and input features to perform their tasks. Minority examples, i.e., examples that contradict the spurious correlations present in the majority of data points, have been…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-02-03 Yadollah Yaghoobzadeh , Soroush Mehri , Remi Tachet , T. J. Hazen , Alessandro Sordoni

In machine learning, incorporating more data is often seen as a reliable strategy for improving model performance; this work challenges that notion by demonstrating that the addition of external datasets in many cases can hurt the resulting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-09 Rhys Compton , Lily Zhang , Aahlad Puli , Rajesh Ranganath