Shortcut Learning

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Overview

Shortcut learning studies how models come to rely on spurious correlations, such as backgrounds, metadata, speaker identity, or dataset structure, rather than evidence relevant to the task. Researchers diagnose these behaviors with controlled interventions, counterfactual and cross-domain tests, modality ablations, attribution methods, and probes of learned representations. Mitigation approaches include data rebalancing and targeted augmentation, causal or adversarial objectives, feature disentanglement, architectural constraints, and post-training or inference-time interventions. A central challenge is that high accuracy and even readable representations do not establish what drives a decision, while suppressing a shortcut can also remove useful signal or fail when the confounder changes.

Latest papers

CardsList

159 papers25 papers in the last four weeks, up 108% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. Harnessing Adversarial Distillation to Customise Debiased, Disease-Specific Pathology Foundation Models for Breast Cancer

    Aug 2, 2026Zhiwei Chen, Yang Hu, Yuxiang Xiao +7Computational PathologyPathology Foundation Models

    School of Computer Science and Engineering, South China University of Technology, China · School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, University of Leicester, UK · Leicester Cancer Research Centre, University of Leicester, UK +4

  2. A Distributional Robustness Margin For Pathology Foundation Models

    Jul 28, 2026Clément Grisi, Jeroen van der Laak, Geert LitjensDistribution Shift RobustnessNeural Network Robustness

    Department of Pathology, Radboud University Medical Center, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

  3. Analysis of the Shortcut Learning and Clever Hans Effect in CNN based ECG Image Classification

    Jul 27, 2026Abhay Kumar Pathak, Mrityunjay Chaubey, Manjari Gupta +1Electrocardiogram ClassificationConvolutional Neural Networks

    Department of Computer Science, Institute of Science, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India. · University of Petroleum and Energy Studies, Dehradun, India. · Department of Computer Science (IDI), Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Gjøvik, Norway.

  4. What do Reward Models Memorize?

    Jul 27, 2026Ivo Verhoeven, Pushkar Mishra, Ekaterina ShutovaReward ModelingPairwise Preference Evaluation

    ILLC, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands · Google DeepMind, London, United Kingdom

  5. PathScale-R1: Cross-scale Reasoning for Pathological Image Analysis

    Jul 26, 2026Chi Phan, Tianyi Zhang, Yufeng Wu +7Computational PathologyMedical VQA

    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore 117417 · Department of Biomedical Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore 117417, Singapore · Department of Pathology, Fujian Medical University Cancer Hospital & Fujian Cancer Hospital, Fuzhou, China +1

  6. Breaking the Synthetic-Real Domain Shortcut for Training-Free Generative Replay-based Class Incremental Learning

    Jul 25, 2026Tao Zhang, Qixuan Fan, Yiyuan Liang +7Class-Incremental LearningSynthetic-to-Real Domain Adaptation

    Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China · State Key Laboratory of Multispectral Information Intelligent Processing Technology, Wuhan, China · University of Science and Technology of China, Anhui, China +1

  7. Alleviating Regional Shortcuts for Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning

    Jul 24, 2026Haichen Zhou, Yazhe Lyu, Yixiong Zou +2Class-Incremental LearningIncremental Learning

    School of Computer Science and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China

  8. Listen, Do Not Copy: Internalizing Audio-Grounded Scaffold Context for Robust Omni-Model Speech Understanding

    Jul 24, 2026Pengfei Zhang, Biao Tian, Tianxin Xie +3Speaker-Attributed ASRContextual ASR

    AI Thrust, Information Hub, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) · Token Foundry, Alibaba Group, China

  9. Probing Speaker Identity Sensitivity in Audio Deepfake Detectors

    Jul 23, 2026Daniyal Kabir Dar, Arun RossAudio Deepfake DetectionShortcut Learning

    Michigan State University, USA

  10. Detectors Learn the Wrong Thing: Shortcut-Resistant Adversarial Training Against Physically Realizable Attacks

    Jul 23, 2026Yuanhao Huang, Yilong Ren, Jinlei Wang +3Adversarial TrainingAdversarial Robustness

    School of Transportation Science and Engineering, Beihang University, 100191, Beijing, P.R China · Zhongguancun Laboratory, 100191, Beijing, P.R China · School of Systems Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-Sen University, 510006, Guangzhou, P.R China +2

  11. Style over Substance: A Shortcut Audit of Emotion-Description Preference Evaluation

    Jul 20, 2026Jiabing Yang, Yixiang Chen, Yuan Xu +6Human Preference EvaluationPairwise Preference Evaluation

    University of Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing, China

  12. Controlling Implicit Shortcut Reliance in L2 Spoken English Auto-markers

    Jul 17, 2026Shilin Gao, Mark J. F. Gales, Kate M. KnillEducational AssessmentAutomated Evaluation

    ALTA Institute, Machine Intelligence Laboratory, Cambridge University Engineering Department Cambridge, UK

  13. Genre Bias or Aesthetic Perception? Identifying and Mitigating Shortcut Learning in Music Evaluation

    Jul 15, 2026Yizhou Zhang, Wangjin Zhou, Yi Zhao +3Human Preference EvaluationAlgorithmic Bias

    Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University, Japan · WXG, Tencent, China

  14. Auditing Protocol-Level Shortcuts in Large Audio Language Model Judges for Speech Evaluation

    Jul 15, 2026Joonyong Park, David M. Chan, Yuki Saito +1Audio-Language Model EvaluationLLM Auditing

    Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan · Berkeley AI Research (BAIR), University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

  15. Inhibited Self-Attention: Sharpening Focus in Vision Transformers

    Jul 14, 2026Peter R. D. van der Wal, Nicola Strisciuglio, George AzzopardiSelf-AttentionVision Transformer

    University of Groningen · University of Twente · 3Stellenbosch University +1

  16. Do Video-LLMs Actually Watch? Diagnosing Character-Tracking Failures in Long-Form Video

    Jul 13, 2026Mohammad Al-Ratrout, Shayla Sharmin, Aditya Raikwar +1Visual Object TrackingVideo-Language Model Evaluation

  17. RED-Sphere: Hyperspherical Residual Edge Debiasing for Cross-Population Fundus Disease Domain Generalization

    Jul 12, 2026Yan Lin, Ziheng Wang, Shuang Chen +2Distribution Shift RobustnessMedical Image Classification

    Newcastle University Newcastle upon Tyne, UK · King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) Thuwal, Saudi Arabia · Durham University Durham, UK

  18. Artificial Foveated Perception for Mitigating Shortcut Learning in Robotic Foundation Models

    Jul 12, 2026Xiatao Sun, Yuan Zhuang, Mateo Sanchez Lopez Negrete +9Robot Foundation ModelsVisual Grounding

    Yale University · University of Connecticut · Peking University +2

  19. When Data Imbalance Helps: Robust Generalization Through Shortcut Saturation

    Jul 11, 2026Cheng-Ting Chou, Duc Binh HoangClass-Imbalanced LearningTransformer

    University of California, Los Angeles

  20. Shortcut Trajectory Planning for Efficient Offline Reinforcement Learning

    Jul 10, 2026Guanquan Wang, Yoshimasa TsuruokaTrajectory GenerationOffline RL

    Department of Information and Communication Engineering · The University of Tokyo

  21. Repairing Shape-Prior Shortcuts in Long-Range Single-Shot Fringe Projection Profilometry

    Jul 10, 2026Adam Haroon, Cody Fleming, Beiwen LiFringe Projection ProfilometryMetric Depth Estimation

    Department of Mechanical Engineering, Iowa State University, 2529 Union Drive, Ames, 50011, Iowa, USA · College of Engineering, University of Georgia, 597 D. W. Brooks Drive, Athens, 30602, Georgia, USA

  22. ReMoDEx: A Local-to-Global Relevance-Based Model Decision Explainability Framework for large-Scale Image Datasets

    Jul 8, 2026Abhay Kumar Pathak, Mrityunjay Chaubey, Manjari GuptaExplainable Artificial IntelligenceExplainable Image Classification

    Department of Computer Science, Institute of Science, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India · University of Petroleum and Energy Studies, Dehradun, India

  23. Association Restoration Test: Revealing Restorable Shortcuts after Unlearning

    Jul 7, 2026Amy Lu, Changxiu JiSpurious Correlation RobustnessShortcut Learning

    Department of Computer Science, Stanford University

  24. Shortcut Learning in Legal Judgment Prediction: Empirical Evidence from the UK Employment Tribunal

    Jul 5, 2026Joe Watson, Joana Ribeiro de Faria, Marcus Tomalin +6Data LeakageLegal NLP

    Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom · The Psychometrics Centre, Cambridge Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom · Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom +3

  25. An Intervention-Based Framework for Shortcut Diagnosis in Spoofing Countermeasures

    Jul 3, 2026Santiago Rubio, Pilar Bello, Dayana Ribas +3Audio Deepfake DetectionASVspoof

    ViVoLab, Arag´on Institute for Engineering Research (I3A), University of Zaragoza, Spain · BTS, Business Telecommunications Services, Spain

  26. The Moving Eye: Enhancing VLA Spatial Generalization via Hybrid Dynamic Data Collection

    Jul 2, 2026Jincheng Tang, Yilong Zhu, Zhengyuan Xie +2Generalization in Robotic ManipulationRobotic Manipulation

    Lion Rock AI Lab, China Merchants Research Institute of Advanced Technology. · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. · Nankai University.

  27. Dataset Biases and Shortcut Learning in Motion-Based AI-Generated Video Detection

    Jul 1, 2026Joren Michels, Lode Jorissen, Nick MichielsAlgorithmic BiasDeepfake Detection

    Digital Future Lab, Flanders Make, Hasselt University

  28. Cross-Domain Generalization Failure in Lightweight Intrusion Detection Models for IIoT Networks

    Jul 1, 2026MD Azizul Hakim, Md Shihab Uddin, Talha Ibne AnisIoT Intrusion DetectionNetwork Intrusion Detection

    Department of Computer Science and Technology, Bangladesh Sweden Polytechnic Institute Kaptai, Rangamati, Chittagong 4530, Bangladesh · Department of Electrical Engineering, Bangladesh Sweden Polytechnic Institute Kaptai, Rangamati, Chittagong 4530, Bangladesh

  29. SGD Provably Prioritizes a Shortcut Spurious Feature in the XOR Model

    Jun 29, 2026Tyler LaBonte, Vidya MuthukumarRepresentation LearningReLU Neural Networks

    H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology · School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology

  30. CouCE: A Unified Causal Framework for Debiased Deep Metric Learning

    Jun 29, 2026Xin Yuan, Zhenyang Niu, Meiqi Wan +3Debiased MLCausal Representation Learning

    Wuhan University of Science and Technology Wuhan, China · Harbin Institute of Technology Harbin, China