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Benchmark performance of deep learning classifiers alone is not a reliable predictor for the performance of a deployed model. In particular, if the image classifier has picked up spurious features in the training data, its predictions can…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-08-24 Yannic Neuhaus , Maximilian Augustin , Valentyn Boreiko , Matthias Hein

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

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

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

Often machine learning models tend to automatically learn associations present in the training data without questioning their validity or appropriateness. This undesirable property is the root cause of the manifestation of spurious…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-17 Preetam Prabhu Srikar Dammu , Chirag Shah

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

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

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

Deep learning models achieve strong performance across various domains but often rely on spurious correlations, making them vulnerable to distribution shifts. This issue is particularly severe in subpopulation shift scenarios, where models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Subeen Park , Joowang Kim , Hakyung Lee , Sunjae Yoo , Kyungwoo Song

Neural networks are known to use spurious correlations such as background information for classification. While prior work has looked at spurious correlations that are widespread in the training data, in this work, we investigate how…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-06 Yao-Yuan Yang , Chi-Ning Chou , Kamalika Chaudhuri

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

Last-layer retraining (LLR) methods -- wherein the last layer of a neural network is reinitialized and retrained on a held-out set following ERM training -- have garnered interest as an efficient approach to rectify dependence on spurious…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 John C. Hill , Tyler LaBonte , Xinchen Zhang , Vidya Muthukumar

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction is a critical task in recommendation systems, serving as the ultimate filtering step to sort items for a user. Most recent cutting-edge methods primarily focus on investigating complex implicit and…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-05-13 Song-Li Wu , Liang Du , Jia-Qi Yang , Yu-Ai Wang , De-Chuan Zhan , Shuang Zhao , Zi-Xun Sun

Recent research has revealed that machine learning models have a tendency to leverage spurious correlations that exist in the training set but may not hold true in general circumstances. For instance, a sentiment classifier may erroneously…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-06 Oscar Chew , Hsuan-Tien Lin , Kai-Wei Chang , Kuan-Hao Huang

Modern machine learning models are prone to over-reliance on spurious correlations, which can often lead to poor performance on minority groups. In this paper, we identify surprising and nuanced behavior of finetuned models on worst-group…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Tyler LaBonte , John C. Hill , Xinchen Zhang , Vidya Muthukumar , Abhishek Kumar

Deep neural networks often rely on spurious features to make predictions, which makes them brittle under distribution shift and on samples where the spurious correlation does not hold (e.g., minority-group examples). Recent studies have…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Aryan Yazdan Parast , Khawar Islam , Soyoun Won , Basim Azam , Naveed Akhtar

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

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

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

Ensuring fair predictions across many distinct subpopulations in the training data can be prohibitive for large models. Recently, simple linear last layer retraining strategies, in combination with data augmentation methods such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-10 Monica Welfert , Nathan Stromberg , Lalitha Sankar