Escaping the SpuriVerse: Can Large Vision-Language Models Generalize Beyond Seen Spurious Correlations?

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Yang, Yiwei, Lee, Chung Peng, Feng, Shangbin, Zhao, Dora, Wen, Bingbing, Liu, Anthony Z., Tsvetkov, Yulia, Howe, Bill
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Yang, Yiwei
Lee, Chung Peng
Feng, Shangbin
Zhao, Dora
Wen, Bingbing
Liu, Anthony Z.
Tsvetkov, Yulia
Howe, Bill
author_facet Yang, Yiwei
Lee, Chung Peng
Feng, Shangbin
Zhao, Dora
Wen, Bingbing
Liu, Anthony Z.
Tsvetkov, Yulia
Howe, Bill
contents Finetuning can cause spurious correlations to arise between non-essential features and the target labels, but benchmarks to study these effects involve contrived settings and narrow tasks. In contrast, we consider spurious correlations in multi-modal Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) pretrained on extensive and diverse datasets without explicit task supervision. We develop a benchmark by sourcing GPT-4o errors on real-world visual-question-answering (VQA) benchmarks, then curating a subset through LVLM-human annotation and synthetic counterfactual evaluation to identify errors caused by spurious correlations. This process yields SpuriVerse, a novel benchmark comprised of 124 distinct types of spurious correlations extracted from real-world datasets, each containing 1 realistic and 10 synthetic VQA samples for a total of 1364 multiple choice questions. We evaluate 15 open and closed-source LVLMs on SpuriVerse, finding that even state-of-the-art closed-source models struggle significantly, achieving at best only 37.1% accuracy. Fine-tuning on synthetic examples that emphasize the spurious correlation improves performance to 78.40%, suggesting that training on diverse spurious patterns generalizes to unseen situations: models appear to learn to avoid "shortcuts" and attend to the overall image context.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_18322
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Escaping the SpuriVerse: Can Large Vision-Language Models Generalize Beyond Seen Spurious Correlations?
Yang, Yiwei
Lee, Chung Peng
Feng, Shangbin
Zhao, Dora
Wen, Bingbing
Liu, Anthony Z.
Tsvetkov, Yulia
Howe, Bill
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Finetuning can cause spurious correlations to arise between non-essential features and the target labels, but benchmarks to study these effects involve contrived settings and narrow tasks. In contrast, we consider spurious correlations in multi-modal Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) pretrained on extensive and diverse datasets without explicit task supervision. We develop a benchmark by sourcing GPT-4o errors on real-world visual-question-answering (VQA) benchmarks, then curating a subset through LVLM-human annotation and synthetic counterfactual evaluation to identify errors caused by spurious correlations. This process yields SpuriVerse, a novel benchmark comprised of 124 distinct types of spurious correlations extracted from real-world datasets, each containing 1 realistic and 10 synthetic VQA samples for a total of 1364 multiple choice questions. We evaluate 15 open and closed-source LVLMs on SpuriVerse, finding that even state-of-the-art closed-source models struggle significantly, achieving at best only 37.1% accuracy. Fine-tuning on synthetic examples that emphasize the spurious correlation improves performance to 78.40%, suggesting that training on diverse spurious patterns generalizes to unseen situations: models appear to learn to avoid "shortcuts" and attend to the overall image context.
title Escaping the SpuriVerse: Can Large Vision-Language Models Generalize Beyond Seen Spurious Correlations?
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.18322