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Related papers: Mitigating Spurious Correlations in LLMs via Causa…

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Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have achieved great success in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks under the pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm. With large quantities of parameters, PLMs are computation-intensive and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-12-15 Runxin Xu , Fuli Luo , Chengyu Wang , Baobao Chang , Jun Huang , Songfang Huang , Fei Huang

The broad capabilities of Language Models (LMs) can be limited by their sensitivity to distractor tasks: LMs can infer secondary tasks from the prompt in addition to the intended one, leading to unwanted outputs. For example, prompt…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-16 Raymond Douglas , Andis Draguns , Tomáš Gavenčiak

Causal learning is the cognitive process of developing the capability of making causal inferences based on available information, often guided by normative principles. This process is prone to errors and biases, such as the illusion of…

Large language models (LLMs) have become the cornerstone of modern AI. However, the existing paradigm of next-token prediction fundamentally limits their ability to form coherent, high-level concepts, making it a critical barrier to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-16 Michael K. Chen , Xikun Zhang , Jiaxing Huang , Dacheng Tao

Recovering the structure of causal graphical models from observational data is an essential yet challenging task for causal discovery in scientific scenarios. Domain-specific causal discovery usually relies on expert validation or prior…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-27 Taiyu Ban , Lyuzhou Chen , Derui Lyu , Xiangyu Wang , Qinrui Zhu , Qiang Tu , Huanhuan Chen

Spurious correlations that degrade model generalization or lead the model to be right for the wrong reasons are one of the main robustness concerns for real-world deployments. However, mitigating these correlations during pre-training for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-01 Yu Yang , Besmira Nushi , Hamid Palangi , Baharan Mirzasoleiman

The causal capabilities of large language models (LLMs) are a matter of significant debate, with critical implications for the use of LLMs in societally impactful domains such as medicine, science, law, and policy. We conduct a "behavorial"…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-08-21 Emre Kıcıman , Robert Ness , Amit Sharma , Chenhao Tan

Pre-trained self-supervised models such as BERT have achieved striking success in learning sequence representations, especially for natural language processing. These models typically corrupt the given sequences with certain types of noise,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-11-02 Fuli Luo , Pengcheng Yang , Shicheng Li , Xuancheng Ren , Xu Sun

Large language models are being widely used across industries to generate content that contributes directly to key performance metrics, such as conversion rates. Pretrained models, however, often fall short when it comes to aligning with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Erfan Loghmani

As large language models (LLMs) witness increasing deployment in complex, high-stakes decision-making scenarios, it becomes imperative to ground their reasoning in causality rather than spurious correlations. However, strong performance on…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Yuzhe Wang , Yaochen Zhu , Jundong Li

Large language models (LLMs) excel at reasoning tasks but are expensive to deploy. Thus small language models (SLMs) are fine-tuned on CoT data generated by LLMs to copy LLMs' abilities. However, these CoT data may include noisy rationales…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-10 Hongyan Xie , Yitong Yao , Yikun Ban , Zixuan Huang , Deqing Wang , Zhenhe Wu , Haoxiang Su , Chao Wang , Shuangyong Song

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable adaptability to diverse tasks, by leveraging context prompts containing instructions, or minimal input-output examples. However, recent work revealed they also exhibit label bias -- an…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Yuval Reif , Roy Schwartz

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have emerged as a central focus in both industry and academia, but often suffer from biases introduced by visual and language priors, which can lead to multimodal hallucination. These biases arise…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Guanyu Zhou , Yibo Yan , Xin Zou , Kun Wang , Aiwei Liu , Xuming Hu

Causal inference is one of the hallmarks of human intelligence. While the field of CausalNLP has attracted much interest in the recent years, existing causal inference datasets in NLP primarily rely on discovering causality from empirical…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-18 Zhijing Jin , Jiarui Liu , Zhiheng Lyu , Spencer Poff , Mrinmaya Sachan , Rada Mihalcea , Mona Diab , Bernhard Schölkopf

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable efficiency in tackling various tasks based on human instructions, but studies reveal that they often struggle with tasks requiring reasoning, such as math or physics. This limitation…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Ruoyu Wang , Xiaoxuan Li , Lina Yao

Adapting to latent confounded shift remains a core challenge in modern AI. This setting is driven by hidden variables that induce spurious correlations between inputs and outputs during training, leading models to rely on non-causal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Jialin Yu , Yuxiang Zhou , Haoxuan Li , Junchi Yu , Mengyue Yang , Yulan He , Nevin L. Zhang , Philip Torr , Ricardo Silva

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

As the significance of understanding the cause-and-effect relationships among variables increases in the development of modern systems and algorithms, learning causality from observational data has become a preferred and efficient approach…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-28 Xiaoxuan Li , Yao Liu , Ruoyu Wang , Lina Yao

While existing social bot detectors perform well on benchmarks, their robustness across diverse real-world scenarios remains limited due to unclear ground truth and varied misleading cues. In particular, the impact of shortcut learning,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Shiyan Zheng , Herun Wan , Minnan Luo , Junhang Huang

Causal learning is the cognitive process of developing the capability of making causal inferences based on available information, often guided by normative principles. This process is prone to errors and biases, such as the illusion of…