Spurious Correlation
Spurious correlation, the misleading association between features and labels unrelated to the true underlying relationship, is a significant challenge in machine learning, hindering model generalization and robustness. Current research focuses on mitigating spurious correlations in various model architectures, including deep neural networks and transformers, through techniques like data augmentation, feature re-weighting, and multi-objective optimization, often leveraging explainability methods to identify and address these biases. Understanding and addressing spurious correlations is crucial for building reliable and fair machine learning systems across diverse applications, from medical image analysis to natural language processing, impacting both the trustworthiness of AI and its equitable deployment.
Papers
Which Spurious Correlations Impact Reasoning in NLI Models? A Visual Interactive Diagnosis through Data-Constrained Counterfactuals
Robin Chan, Afra Amini, Mennatallah El-Assady
Towards Mitigating more Challenging Spurious Correlations: A Benchmark & New Datasets
Siddharth Joshi, Yu Yang, Yihao Xue, Wenhan Yang, Baharan Mirzasoleiman
How to Construct Perfect and Worse-than-Coin-Flip Spoofing Countermeasures: A Word of Warning on Shortcut Learning
Hye-jin Shim, Rosa González Hautamäki, Md Sahidullah, Tomi Kinnunen
Signal Is Harder To Learn Than Bias: Debiasing with Focal Loss
Moritz Vandenhirtz, Laura Manduchi, Ričards Marcinkevičs, Julia E. Vogt