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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

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

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

Spurious correlations that lead models to correct predictions for the wrong reasons pose a critical challenge for robust real-world generalization. Existing research attributes this issue to group imbalance and addresses it by maximizing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Miaoyun Zhao , Chenrong Li , Qiang Zhang

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

Recent years have witnessed the great success of self-supervised learning (SSL) in recommendation systems. However, SSL recommender models are likely to suffer from spurious correlations, leading to poor generalization. To mitigate spurious…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-04-19 Xinyu Lin , Yiyan Xu , Wenjie Wang , Yang Zhang , Fuli Feng

Empirical risk minimization (ERM) is sensitive to spurious correlations in the training data, which poses a significant risk when deploying systems trained under this paradigm in high-stake applications. While the existing literature…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Christos Tsirigotis , Joao Monteiro , Pau Rodriguez , David Vazquez , Aaron Courville

The existence of spurious correlations such as image backgrounds in the training environment can make empirical risk minimization (ERM) perform badly in the test environment. To address this problem, Kirichenko et al. (2022) empirically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-10 Haotian Ye , James Zou , Linjun Zhang

A major challenge to out-of-distribution generalization is reliance on spurious features -- patterns that are predictive of the class label in the training data distribution, but not causally related to the target. Standard methods for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-21 Shikai Qiu , Andres Potapczynski , Pavel Izmailov , Andrew Gordon Wilson

Acquiring and training on large-scale labeled data can be impractical due to cost constraints. Additionally, the use of small training datasets can result in considerable variability in model outcomes, overfitting, and learning of spurious…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Jiashu Tao , Reza Shokri

Recent work has shown that pre-trained language models such as BERT improve robustness to spurious correlations in the dataset. Intrigued by these results, we find that the key to their success is generalization from a small amount of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-08-12 Lifu Tu , Garima Lalwani , Spandana Gella , He He

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

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

Out-of-distribution generalization of machine learning models remains challenging since the models are inherently bound to the training data distribution. This especially manifests, when the learned models rely on spurious correlations.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-27 Martin Surner , Abdelmajid Khelil , Ludwig Bothmann

Without loss of generality, existing machine learning techniques may learn spurious correlation dependent on the domain, which exacerbates the generalization of models in out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios. To address this issue, recent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Bin Qin , Jiangmeng Li , Yi Li , Xuesong Wu , Yupeng Wang , Wenwen Qiang , Jianwen Cao

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

The presence of spurious features interferes with the goal of obtaining robust models that perform well across many groups within the population. A natural remedy is to remove spurious features from the model. However, in this work we show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-09 Fereshte Khani , Percy Liang

Neural network training tends to exploit the simplest features as shortcuts to greedily minimize training loss. However, some of these features might be spuriously correlated with the target labels, leading to incorrect predictions by the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Shahin Hakemi , Naveed Akhtar , Ghulam Mubashar Hassan , Ajmal Mian

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

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