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Related papers: Spurious Correlations and Where to Find Them

200 papers

In text classification tasks, models often rely on spurious correlations for predictions, incorrectly associating irrelevant features with the target labels. This issue limits the robustness and generalization of models, especially when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Yuqing Zhou , Ziwei Zhu

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

While deep learning models have shown remarkable performance in various tasks, they are susceptible to learning non-generalizable spurious features rather than the core features that are genuinely correlated to the true label. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Yihe Deng , Yu Yang , Baharan Mirzasoleiman , Quanquan Gu

One of the fundamental challenges found throughout the data sciences is to explain why things happen in specific ways, or through which mechanisms a certain variable $X$ exerts influences over another variable $Y$. In statistics and machine…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-06-09 Drago Plecko , Elias Bareinboim

Distribution shifts are common in real-world datasets and can affect the performance and reliability of deep learning models. In this paper, we study two types of distribution shifts: diversity shifts, which occur when test samples exhibit…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-12-22 Alceu Bissoto , Catarina Barata , Eduardo Valle , Sandra Avila

Neural networks often learn to make predictions that overly rely on spurious correlation existing in the dataset, which causes the model to be biased. While previous work tackles this issue by using explicit labeling on the spuriously…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-24 Junhyun Nam , Hyuntak Cha , Sungsoo Ahn , Jaeho Lee , Jinwoo Shin

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

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

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

Many data mining and statistical machine learning algorithms have been developed to select a subset of covariates to associate with a response variable. Spurious discoveries can easily arise in high-dimensional data analysis due to enormous…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2016-10-25 Jianqing Fan , Wen-Xin Zhou

Entity typing aims at predicting one or more words that describe the type(s) of a specific mention in a sentence. Due to shortcuts from surface patterns to annotated entity labels and biased training, existing entity typing models are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-27 Nan Xu , Fei Wang , Bangzheng Li , Mingtao Dong , Muhao Chen

We present a human-in-the-loop dashboard tailored to diagnosing potential spurious features that NLI models rely on for predictions. The dashboard enables users to generate diverse and challenging examples by drawing inspiration from GPT-3…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-22 Robin Chan , Afra Amini , Mennatallah El-Assady

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

Among the most critical limitations of deep learning NLP models are their lack of interpretability, and their reliance on spurious correlations. Prior work proposed various approaches to interpreting the black-box models to unveil the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-10-08 Xiaochuang Han , Yulia Tsvetkov

To draw scientifically meaningful conclusions and build reliable models of quantitative phenomena, cause and effect must be taken into consideration (either implicitly or explicitly). This is particularly challenging when the measurements…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-11 Max A. Little , Reham Badawy

Despite alarm over the reliance of machine learning systems on so-called spurious patterns, the term lacks coherent meaning in standard statistical frameworks. However, the language of causality offers clarity: spurious associations are due…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-02-18 Divyansh Kaushik , Eduard Hovy , Zachary C. Lipton

Instance features in images exhibit spurious correlations with background features, affecting the training process of deep neural classifiers. This leads to insufficient attention to instance features by the classifier, resulting in…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-12-30 Xuewei Li , Zhenzhen Nie , Mei Yu , Zijian Zhang , Jie Gao , Tianyi Xu , Zhiqiang Liu

Deep learning models can perform well in complex medical imaging classification tasks, even when basing their conclusions on spurious correlations (i.e. confounders), should they be prevalent in the training dataset, rather than on the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-08-23 Amar Kumar , Nima Fathi , Raghav Mehta , Brennan Nichyporuk , Jean-Pierre R. Falet , Sotirios Tsaftaris , Tal Arbel

Image classifiers often use spurious patterns, such as "relying on the presence of a person to detect a tennis racket, which do not generalize. In this work, we present an end-to-end pipeline for identifying and mitigating spurious patterns…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-19 Gregory Plumb , Marco Tulio Ribeiro , Ameet Talwalkar

Deep learning models often achieve high performance by inadvertently learning spurious correlations between targets and non-essential features. For example, an image classifier may identify an object via its background that spuriously…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Guangtao Zheng , Wenqian Ye , Aidong Zhang