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Related papers: Spurious Correlations and Where to Find Them

200 papers

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

Weakly supervised question answering usually has only the final answers as supervision signals while the correct solutions to derive the answers are not provided. This setting gives rise to the spurious solution problem: there may exist…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Zhihong Shao , Lifeng Shang , Qun Liu , Minlie Huang

Continual Learning (CL) is the research field addressing learning without forgetting when the data distribution is not static. This paper studies spurious features' influence on continual learning algorithms. We show that continual learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-27 Timothée Lesort

As relational event models are an increasingly popular model for studying relational structures, the reliability of large-scale event data collection becomes more and more important. Automated or human-coded events often suffer from…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-05-25 Cornelius Fritz , Marius Mehrl , Paul W. Thurner , Göran Kauermann

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

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

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

Conventional supervised learning methods are often vulnerable to spurious correlations, particularly under distribution shifts in test data. To address this issue, several approaches, most notably Group DRO, have been developed. While these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Sung Ho Jo , Seonghwi Kim , Minwoo Chae

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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-07 Zhao Wang , Aron Culotta

Spurious bias, a tendency to exploit spurious correlations between superficial input attributes and prediction targets, has revealed a severe robustness pitfall in classical machine learning problems. Multimodal Large Language Models…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Wenqian Ye , Bohan Liu , Guangtao Zheng , Di Wang , Yunsheng Ma , Xu Cao , Bolin Lai , James M. Rehg , Aidong Zhang

Causal discovery from data affected by unobserved variables is an important but difficult problem to solve. The effects that unobserved variables have on the relationships between observed variables are more complex in nonlinear cases than…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-07 Takashi Nicholas Maeda , Shohei Shimizu

Natural language processing models often exploit spurious correlations between task-independent features and labels in datasets to perform well only within the distributions they are trained on, while not generalising to different task…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-03-25 Yuxiang Wu , Matt Gardner , Pontus Stenetorp , Pradeep Dasigi

Informally, a 'spurious correlation' is the dependence of a model on some aspect of the input data that an analyst thinks shouldn't matter. In machine learning, these have a know-it-when-you-see-it character; e.g., changing the gender of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-04 Victor Veitch , Alexander D'Amour , Steve Yadlowsky , Jacob Eisenstein

Spurious correlations allow flexible models to predict well during training but poorly on related test distributions. Recent work has shown that models that satisfy particular independencies involving correlation-inducing \textit{nuisance}…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-10 Mark Goldstein , Jörn-Henrik Jacobsen , Olina Chau , Adriel Saporta , Aahlad Puli , Rajesh Ranganath , Andrew C. Miller

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

Traditional wisdom in generative modeling literature is that spurious samples that a model can generate are errors and they should be avoided. Recent research, however, has shown interest in studying or even exploiting such samples instead…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-05 Balázs Kégl , Mehdi Cherti , Akın Kazakçı

Neural networks employ spurious correlations in their predictions, resulting in decreased performance when these correlations do not hold. Recent works suggest fixing pretrained representations and training a classification head that does…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-23 Rafayel Darbinyan , Hrayr Harutyunyan , Aram H. Markosyan , Hrant Khachatrian

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-12-20 Yoshiyuki Ninomiya , Satoshi Kuriki , Toshihiko Shiroishi , Toyoyuki Takada

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