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Shortcut mitigation strategies commonly rely on training data annotations, group-balanced held-out data or the presence of all groups, i.e., all combinations of (spurious) attributes and classes, in the training data. However, these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Phuong Quynh Le , Jörg Schlötterer , Sari Sadiya , Gemma Roig , Christin Seifert

Large language models exhibit strong reasoning capabilities, yet often rely on shortcuts such as surface pattern matching and answer memorization rather than genuine logical inference. We propose Shortcut-Aware Reasoning Training (SART), a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Hongyu Cao , Kunpeng Liu , Dongjie Wang , Yanjie Fu

Recent studies indicate that NLU models are prone to rely on shortcut features for prediction, without achieving true language understanding. As a result, these models fail to generalize to real-world out-of-distribution data. In this work,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-04-15 Mengnan Du , Varun Manjunatha , Rajiv Jain , Ruchi Deshpande , Franck Dernoncourt , Jiuxiang Gu , Tong Sun , Xia Hu

Shortcut learning, i.e., a model's reliance on undesired features not directly relevant to the task, is a major challenge that severely limits the applications of machine learning algorithms, particularly when deploying them to assist in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Lukas Kuhn , Sari Sadiya , Jorg Schlotterer , Florian Buettner , Christin Seifert , Gemma Roig

Controlling the patterns a model learns is essential to preventing reliance on irrelevant or misleading features. Such reliance on irrelevant features, often called shortcut features, has been observed across domains, including medical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Mihnea Ghitu , Vihari Piratla , Matthew Wicker

Shortcuts, spurious rules that perform well during training but fail to generalize, present a major challenge to the reliability of deep networks (Geirhos et al., 2020). However, the impact of shortcuts on feature representations remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-06 Nikita Tsoy , Nikola Konstantinov

Test-time reinforcement learning (TTRL) always adapts models at inference time via pseudo-labeling, leaving it vulnerable to spurious optimization signals from label noise. Through an empirical study, we observe that responses with medium…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Yongcan Yu , Lingxiao He , Jian Liang , Kuangpu Guo , Meng Wang , Qianlong Xie , Xingxing Wang , Ran He

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

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

Deep learning models have attracted lots of research attention in time series classification (TSC) task in the past two decades. Recently, deep neural networks (DNN) have surpassed classical distance-based methods and achieved…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Salomon Ibarra , Frida Cantu , Kaixiong Zhou , Li Zhang

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance in natural language tasks, but their outputs can exhibit undesirable attributes or biases. Existing methods for steering LLMs toward desired attributes often assume unbiased…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-05 Zhixuan Chu , Yan Wang , Longfei Li , Zhibo Wang , Zhan Qin , Kui Ren

Deep learning models are prone to learning shortcut solutions to problems using spuriously correlated yet irrelevant features of their training data. In high-risk applications such as medical image analysis, this phenomenon may prevent…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Christopher Boland , Sotirios Tsaftaris , Sonia Dahdouh

Empirical risk minimization (ERM) incentivizes models to exploit shortcuts, i.e., spurious correlations between input attributes and labels that are prevalent in the majority of the training data but unrelated to the task at hand. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-09 Michalis Korakakis , Andreas Vlachos , Adrian Weller

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved impressive results on various natural language processing tasks. However, recent research has revealed that these models often rely on superficial features and shortcuts instead of developing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Zihao Li , Ruixiang Tang , Lu Cheng , Shuaiqiang Wang , Dawei Yin , Mengnan Du

Reward hacking arises when a model improves a proxy reward by exploiting shortcuts rather than solving the intended task. We study this failure mode through the geometry of reinforcement learning updates in language models and argue that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Wenlong Deng , Jiaji Huang , Kaan Ozkara , Yushu Li , Christos Thrampoulidis , Xiaoxiao Li , Youngsuk Park

Large language models (LLMs) often inherit biases from vast amounts of training corpora. Traditional debiasing methods, while effective to some extent, do not completely eliminate memorized biases and toxicity in LLMs. In this paper, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-25 Huimin Lu , Masaru Isonuma , Junichiro Mori , Ichiro Sakata

The cross-lingual language models are typically pretrained with masked language modeling on multilingual text or parallel sentences. In this paper, we introduce denoising word alignment as a new cross-lingual pre-training task.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-14 Zewen Chi , Li Dong , Bo Zheng , Shaohan Huang , Xian-Ling Mao , Heyan Huang , Furu Wei

Debiasing language models from unwanted behaviors in Natural Language Understanding tasks is a topic with rapidly increasing interest in the NLP community. Spurious statistical correlations in the data allow models to perform shortcuts and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-12-06 Johannes Mario Meissner , Saku Sugawara , Akiko Aizawa

We introduce a lightweight yet highly effective safety guardrail framework for language models, demonstrating that small-scale language models can achieve, and even surpass, the performance of larger counterparts in content moderation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-14 Aleksei Ilin , Gor Matevosyan , Xueying Ma , Vladimir Eremin , Suhaa Dada , Muqun Li , Riyaaz Shaik , Haluk Noyan Tokgozoglu

Recent work has demonstrated that finetuning is a promising approach to 'unlearn' concepts from large language models. However, finetuning can be expensive, as it requires both generating a set of examples and running iterations of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-12 Pratiksha Thaker , Yash Maurya , Shengyuan Hu , Zhiwei Steven Wu , Virginia Smith
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