Fighting Spurious Correlations in Text Classification via a Causal Learning Perspective

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Hauptverfasser: Zhou, Yuqing, Zhu, Ziwei
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Zhou, Yuqing
Zhu, Ziwei
author_facet Zhou, Yuqing
Zhu, Ziwei
contents In text classification tasks, models often rely on spurious correlations for predictions, incorrectly associating irrelevant features with the target labels. This issue limits the robustness and generalization of models, especially when faced with out-of-distribution data where such spurious correlations no longer hold. To address this challenge, we propose the Causally Calibrated Robust Classifier (CCR), which aims to reduce models' reliance on spurious correlations and improve model robustness. Our approach integrates a causal feature selection method based on counterfactual reasoning, along with an unbiased inverse propensity weighting (IPW) loss function. By focusing on selecting causal features, we ensure that the model relies less on spurious features during prediction. We theoretically justify our approach and empirically show that CCR achieves state-of-the-art performance among methods without group labels, and in some cases, it can compete with the models that utilize group labels.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_01045
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Fighting Spurious Correlations in Text Classification via a Causal Learning Perspective
Zhou, Yuqing
Zhu, Ziwei
Machine Learning
Computation and Language
In text classification tasks, models often rely on spurious correlations for predictions, incorrectly associating irrelevant features with the target labels. This issue limits the robustness and generalization of models, especially when faced with out-of-distribution data where such spurious correlations no longer hold. To address this challenge, we propose the Causally Calibrated Robust Classifier (CCR), which aims to reduce models' reliance on spurious correlations and improve model robustness. Our approach integrates a causal feature selection method based on counterfactual reasoning, along with an unbiased inverse propensity weighting (IPW) loss function. By focusing on selecting causal features, we ensure that the model relies less on spurious features during prediction. We theoretically justify our approach and empirically show that CCR achieves state-of-the-art performance among methods without group labels, and in some cases, it can compete with the models that utilize group labels.
title Fighting Spurious Correlations in Text Classification via a Causal Learning Perspective
topic Machine Learning
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.01045