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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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-29 Simone Bombari , Marco Mondelli

Modern NLP models are often trained over large untrusted datasets, raising the potential for a malicious adversary to compromise model behaviour. For instance, backdoors can be implanted through crafting training instances with a specific…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-23 Xuanli He , Qiongkai Xu , Jun Wang , Benjamin Rubinstein , Trevor Cohn

To address the problem of NLP classifiers learning spurious correlations between training features and target labels, a common approach is to make the model's predictions invariant to these features. However, this can be counter-productive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-22 Parikshit Bansal , Amit Sharma

Natural Language Inference (NLI) has been extensively studied by the NLP community as a framework for estimating the semantic relation between sentence pairs. While early work identified certain biases in NLI models, recent advancements in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-11-02 Tal Schuster , Sihao Chen , Senaka Buthpitiya , Alex Fabrikant , Donald Metzler

In NLP, recent work has seen increased focus on spurious correlations between various features and labels in training data, and how these influence model behavior. However, the presence and effect of such correlations are typically examined…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-06 Sofia Serrano , Jesse Dodge , Noah A. Smith

Language models (LMs) have achieved notable success in numerous NLP tasks, employing both fine-tuning and in-context learning (ICL) methods. While language models demonstrate exceptional performance, they face robustness challenges due to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Yuhang Zhou , Paiheng Xu , Xiaoyu Liu , Bang An , Wei Ai , Furong Huang

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

In prediction tasks, there exist features that are related to the label in the same way across different settings for that task; these are semantic features or semantics. Features with varying relationships to the label are nuisances. For…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-04 Aahlad Puli , Nitish Joshi , Yoav Wald , He He , Rajesh Ranganath

Identifying spurious correlations learned by a trained model is at the core of refining a trained model and building a trustworthy model. We present a simple method to identify spurious correlations that have been learned by a model trained…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-12-07 Misgina Tsighe Hagos , Kathleen M. Curran , Brian Mac Namee

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

Natural Language Inference (NLI) has been an important task for evaluating language models for Natural Language Understanding, but the logical properties of the task are poorly understood and often mischaracterized. Understanding the notion…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-12 Rasmus Blanck , Bill Noble , Stergios Chatzikyriakidis

The reliability of machine learning systems critically assumes that the associations between features and labels remain similar between training and test distributions. However, unmeasured variables, such as confounders, break this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-17 Megha Srivastava , Tatsunori Hashimoto , Percy Liang

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

We introduce Uncertain Natural Language Inference (UNLI), a refinement of Natural Language Inference (NLI) that shifts away from categorical labels, targeting instead the direct prediction of subjective probability assessments. We…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-05-06 Tongfei Chen , Zhengping Jiang , Adam Poliak , Keisuke Sakaguchi , Benjamin Van Durme

Unimodal vision models are known to rely on spurious correlations, but it remains unclear to what extent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) exhibit similar biases despite language supervision. In this paper, we investigate spurious…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Parsa Hosseini , Sumit Nawathe , Mazda Moayeri , Sriram Balasubramanian , Soheil Feizi

Large language models are highly sensitive to prompts, but this sensitivity is usually studied through task-relevant instructions, demonstrations, or reasoning cues. In this paper, we study a different form of prompt sensitivity: whether…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Pawel Batorski , Abtin Pourhadi , Jerzy Sarosiek , Przemyslaw Spurek , Paul Swoboda

The inevitable appearance of spurious correlations in training datasets hurts the generalization of NLP models on unseen data. Previous work has found that datasets with paired inputs are prone to correlations between a specific part of the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Yanai Elazar , Bhargavi Paranjape , Hao Peng , Sarah Wiegreffe , Khyathi Raghavi , Vivek Srikumar , Sameer Singh , Noah A. Smith

Causality is vital for understanding true cause-and-effect relationships between variables within predictive models, rather than relying on mere correlations, making it highly relevant in the field of Explainable AI. In an automated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-28 Arturo Fredes , Jordi Vitria

Conditional language models still generate unfaithful output that is not supported by their input. These unfaithful generations jeopardize trust in real-world applications such as summarization or human-machine interaction, motivating a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-29 Julius Steen , Juri Opitz , Anette Frank , Katja Markert

While deep neural network models offer unmatched classification performance, they are prone to learning spurious correlations in the data. Such dependencies on confounding information can be difficult to detect using performance metrics if…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-09 Susu Sun , Lisa M. Koch , Christian F. Baumgartner