English
Related papers

Related papers: Stubborn Lexical Bias in Data and Models

200 papers

Gender, race and social biases have recently been detected as evident examples of unfairness in applications of Natural Language Processing. A key path towards fairness is to understand, analyse and interpret our data and algorithms. Recent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-05-06 Christine Basta , Marta R. Costa-jussà

Researchers recently found out that sometimes language models achieve high accuracy on benchmark data set, but they can not generalize very well with even little changes to the original data set. This is sometimes due to data artifacts,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-26 Han Chen

Existing research often posits spurious features as easier to learn than core features in neural network optimization, but the impact of their relative simplicity remains under-explored. Moreover, studies mainly focus on end performance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-27 GuanWen Qiu , Da Kuang , Surbhi Goel

Machine learning models often rely on simple spurious features -- patterns in training data that correlate with targets but are not causally related to them, like image backgrounds in foreground classification. This reliance typically leads…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Chenyu You , Haocheng Dai , Yifei Min , Jasjeet S. Sekhon , Sarang Joshi , James S. Duncan

Models trained with empirical risk minimization (ERM) are prone to be biased towards spurious correlations between target labels and bias attributes, which leads to poor performance on data groups lacking spurious correlations. It is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-23 Hyeonggeun Han , Sehwan Kim , Hyungjun Joo , Sangwoo Hong , Jungwoo Lee

Pseudo-labels are confident predictions made on unlabeled target data by a classifier trained on labeled source data. They are widely used for adapting a model to unlabeled data, e.g., in a semi-supervised learning setting. Our key insight…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-22 Xudong Wang , Zhirong Wu , Long Lian , Stella X. Yu

In this work we show how large language models (LLMs) can learn statistical dependencies between otherwise unconditionally independent variables due to dataset selection bias. To demonstrate the effect, we developed a masked gender task…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-07-20 Emily McMilin

Neural networks are prone to be biased towards spurious correlations between classes and latent attributes exhibited in a major portion of training data, which ruins their generalization capability. We propose a new method for training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-02 Nayeong Kim , Sehyun Hwang , Sungsoo Ahn , Jaesik Park , Suha Kwak

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

Rigorous evaluation of the causal effects of semantic features on language model predictions can be hard to achieve for natural language reasoning problems. However, this is such a desirable form of analysis from both an interpretability…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-04 Julia Rozanova , Marco Valentino , Andre Freitas

Biases in the dataset often enable the model to achieve high performance on in-distribution data, while poorly performing on out-of-distribution data. To mitigate the detrimental effect of the bias on the networks, previous works have…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-07 Eojin Jeon , Mingyu Lee , Juhyeong Park , Yeachan Kim , Wing-Lam Mok , SangKeun Lee

It is widely recognized that deep neural networks are sensitive to bias in the data. This means that during training these models are likely to learn spurious correlations between data and labels, resulting in limited generalization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-06 Vito Paolo Pastore , Massimiliano Ciranni , Davide Marinelli , Francesca Odone , Vittorio Murino

Machine learning models tend to learn spurious features - features that strongly correlate with target labels but are not causal. Existing approaches to mitigate models' dependence on spurious features work in some cases, but fail in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-23 Phuong Quynh Le , Jörg Schlötterer , Christin Seifert

Learning with noisy labels aims to ensure model generalization given a label-corrupted training set. The sample selection strategy achieves promising performance by selecting a label-reliable subset for model training. In this paper, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-11 Qi Wei , Lei Feng , Haobo Wang , Bo An

We present a simple but effective method to measure and mitigate model biases caused by reliance on spurious cues. Instead of requiring costly changes to one's data or model training, our method better utilizes the data one already has by…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Mazda Moayeri , Wenxiao Wang , Sahil Singla , Soheil Feizi

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

Language models serve as proxies for human preference judgements in alignment and evaluation, yet they exhibit systematic miscalibration, prioritizing superficial patterns over substantive qualities. This bias manifests as overreliance on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Anirudh Bharadwaj , Chaitanya Malaviya , Nitish Joshi , Mark Yatskar

Given a supervised machine learning problem where the training set has been subject to a known sampling bias, how can a model be trained to fit the original dataset? We achieve this through the Bayesian inference framework by altering the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-16 Max Sklar

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

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable adaptability to diverse tasks, by leveraging context prompts containing instructions, or minimal input-output examples. However, recent work revealed they also exhibit label bias -- an…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Yuval Reif , Roy Schwartz