Related papers: Removing Spurious Correlation from Neural Network …
Convenient access to observational data enables us to learn causal effects without randomized experiments. This research direction draws increasing attention in research areas such as economics, healthcare, and education. For example, we…
Causal inference is the process of estimating the effect or impact of a treatment on an outcome with other covariates as potential confounders (and mediators) that may need to be controlled. The vast majority of existing methods and systems…
Shortcuts, also described as Clever Hans behavior, spurious correlations, or confounders, present a significant challenge in machine learning and AI, critically affecting model generalization and robustness. Research in this area, however,…
Confounding seriously impairs our ability to learn about causal relations from observational data. Confounding can be defined as a statistical association between two variables due to inputs from a common source (the confounder). For…
This work extends causal inference with stochastic confounders. We propose a new approach to variational estimation for causal inference based on a representer theorem with a random input space. We estimate causal effects involving latent…
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…
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…
Conditioning on some set of confounders that causally affect both treatment and outcome variables can be sufficient for eliminating bias introduced by all such confounders when estimating causal effect of the treatment on the outcome from…
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…
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…
Deep neural classifiers tend to rely on spurious correlations between spurious attributes of inputs and targets to make predictions, which could jeopardize their generalization capability. Training classifiers robust to spurious…
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…
Most algorithms in classical and contemporary machine learning focus on correlation-based dependence between features to drive performance. Although success has been observed in many relevant problems, these algorithms fail when the…
In many classification datasets, the task labels are spuriously correlated with some input attributes. Classifiers trained on such datasets often rely on these attributes for prediction, especially when the spurious correlation is high, and…
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…
Common methods for interpreting neural models in natural language processing typically examine either their structure or their behavior, but not both. We propose a methodology grounded in the theory of causal mediation analysis for…
Machine learning models are known to learn spurious correlations, i.e., features having strong relations with class labels but no causal relation. Relying on those correlations leads to poor performance in the data groups without these…
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…
We present a constraint-based algorithm for learning causal structures from observational time-series data, in the presence of latent confounders. We assume a discrete-time, stationary structural vector autoregressive process, with both…
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.…