Early Cue Precision Shapes Visual Shortcut Learning in Controlled Cue-Manipulation Benchmarks

Understanding how neural networks rely on visual cues offers a human-interpretable view of their internal decision processes. The cue-conflict benchmark has been influential in probing shape-texture preference and in motivating the insight that stronger, human-like shape bias is often associated with improved in-domain performance. However, we find that the current stylization-based instantiation can yield unstable and ambiguous bias estimates. Specifically, stylization may not reliably instantiate perceptually valid and separable cues nor control their relative informativeness, ratio-based bias can obscure absolute cue sensitivity, and restricting evaluation to preselected classes can distort model predictions by ignoring the full decision space. Together, these factors can confound preference with cue validity, cue balance, and recognizability artifacts. We introduce REFINED-BIAS, an integrated dataset and evaluation framework for reliable and interpretable shape-texture bias diagnosis. REFINED-BIAS constructs balanced, human- and model- recognizable cue pairs using explicit definitions of shape and texture, and measures cue-specific sensitivity over the full label space via a ranking-based metric, enabling fairer cross-model comparisons. Across diverse training regimes and architectures, REFINED-BIAS enables fairer cross-model comparison, more faithful diagnosis of shape and texture biases, and clearer empirical conclusions, resolving inconsistencies that prior cue-conflict evaluations could not reliably disambiguate.

Neural networks suffer from shortcut learning, where learned features generalize well to the training set but not to in-distribution (ID) or out-of-distribution (OOD) test sets. Existing studies are all based on a few standard benchmarks, which are shape-driven. Numerous application domains, however, are texture-driven. In this work, we present shortcut learning analysis for texture-driven domains, and compare it with that of a standard benchmark. We show that texture-driven domains suffer from low-frequency shortcuts. They make the majority of their decisions based on a few low-frequency components (LFCs) with a skewed spectral behavior, despite that their classification information is in higher-frequency, fine-grained details. Pruning LFCs from training and test sets eliminates the shortcut and provides a more balanced spectral behavior, improving the ID accuracy by up to 8%. We show that low-frequency shortcuts make the models highly vulnerable to OOD corruptions, leading up to 70% accuracy drop compared to the ID accuracy. Pruning LFCs significantly improves robustness to low-frequency corruptions, by up to 40%, and introduces a trade-off for high-frequency corruptions; the balanced spectral behavior provides a better generalization performance, whereas the increased dependence on high-frequency features reduces it. OOD accuracy depends on the interaction between these two factors.

Standard Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) exhibit severe performance degradation due to a strong inductive texture bias that prioritizes local, high-frequency patterns over global structural shapes. This dependency causes confident misclassifications during textural changes or environmental effects. To address this flaw, this study introduces the Texture-Penalized Prototype Network (TPPN), a novel architectural framework that shifts this inherent bias without depending on resource-intensive augmented datasets. Specifically, a Texture-Penalization Branch (TPB) imposes a penalty to suppress the extraction of local texture proxies, forcing the network backbone to discard high-frequency cues and extract purified, shape-biased representations. By evaluating similarities within a prototype-based hypersphere derived from the final convolutional features, the approach enforces strict geometric constraints, treating objects as compositions of essential parts to achieve robust classification. Evaluations on texture-shape cue-conflict datasets and synthetic noise benchmarks demonstrate the stronger shape bias of this structural disentanglement. The proposed framework reduces the inherent texture bias of a baseline ResNet-50 from 55.11% to 29.73%, surpassing the texture-suppression capabilities of an off-the-shelf Vision Transformer (ViT-B/16). Furthermore, the approach demonstrates robust generalization under cue-conflict conditions, resisting textural shortcut learning when encountering Out-of-Distribution (OOD) shapes. The model maintains stronger shape accuracy against elevated perturbations. On clean validation data, the architecture incurs a minimal drop in accuracy of 0.90 percentage points. This provides a structural, efficient solution to CNN texture bias.