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Related papers: Controlling Learned Effects to Reduce Spurious Cor…

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Learning invariant representations is an important requirement when training machine learning models that are driven by spurious correlations in the datasets. These spurious correlations, between input samples and the target labels, wrongly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-12 Vishnu Suresh Lokhande , Kihyuk Sohn , Jinsung Yoon , Madeleine Udell , Chen-Yu Lee , Tomas Pfister

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

We propose an information-theoretic bias measurement technique through a causal interpretation of spurious correlation, which is effective to identify the feature-level algorithmic bias by taking advantage of conditional mutual information.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-11 Seonguk Seo , Joon-Young Lee , Bohyung Han

Recent work has shown that deep learning models in NLP are highly sensitive to low-level correlations between simple features and specific output labels, leading to overfitting and lack of generalization. To mitigate this problem, a common…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-04-28 Roy Schwartz , Gabriel Stanovsky

Much recent work in NLP has documented dataset artifacts, bias, and spurious correlations between input features and output labels. However, how to tell which features have "spurious" instead of legitimate correlations is typically left…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-12-30 Matt Gardner , William Merrill , Jesse Dodge , Matthew E. Peters , Alexis Ross , Sameer Singh , Noah A. Smith

Training neural networks with one-hot target labels often results in overconfidence and overfitting. Label smoothing addresses this issue by perturbing the one-hot target labels by adding a uniform probability vector to create a regularized…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Sachin Chhabra , Hemanth Venkateswara , Baoxin Li

Large datasets in NLP suffer from noisy labels, due to erroneous automatic and human annotation procedures. We study the problem of text classification with label noise, and aim to capture this noise through an auxiliary noise model over…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Siddhant Garg , Goutham Ramakrishnan , Varun Thumbe

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

While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in language modeling, recent studies reveal that they often fail on out-of-distribution (OOD) samples due to spurious correlations acquired during pre-training.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-12 Shurui Gui , Shuiwang Ji

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 reliance of text classifiers on spurious correlations can lead to poor generalization at deployment, raising concerns about their use in safety-critical domains such as healthcare. In this work, we propose to use counterfactual data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-10 Amir Feder , Yoav Wald , Claudia Shi , Suchi Saria , David Blei

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

While existing social bot detectors perform well on benchmarks, their robustness across diverse real-world scenarios remains limited due to unclear ground truth and varied misleading cues. In particular, the impact of shortcut learning,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Shiyan Zheng , Herun Wan , Minnan Luo , Junhang Huang

Multi-Task Learning (MTL) is a powerful learning paradigm to improve generalization performance via knowledge sharing. However, existing studies find that MTL could sometimes hurt generalization, especially when two tasks are less…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-28 Ziniu Hu , Zhe Zhao , Xinyang Yi , Tiansheng Yao , Lichan Hong , Yizhou Sun , Ed H. Chi

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

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are prone to learning spurious features that correlate with the label during training but are irrelevant to the learning problem. This hurts model generalization and poses problems when deploying them in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-17 Nihal Murali , Aahlad Puli , Ke Yu , Rajesh Ranganath , Kayhan Batmanghelich

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…

A trained neural network can be interpreted as a structural causal model (SCM) that provides the effect of changing input variables on the model's output. However, if training data contains both causal and correlational relationships, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-30 Sai Srinivas Kancheti , Abbavaram Gowtham Reddy , Vineeth N Balasubramanian , Amit Sharma

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

Complementary-label learning is a weakly supervised learning problem in which each training example is associated with one or multiple complementary labels indicating the classes to which it does not belong. Existing consistent approaches…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-14 Wei Wang , Takashi Ishida , Yu-Jie Zhang , Gang Niu , Masashi Sugiyama