Mitigating Shortcut Learning with InterpoLated Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Korakakis, Michalis, Vlachos, Andreas, Weller, Adrian
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Korakakis, Michalis
Vlachos, Andreas
Weller, Adrian
author_facet Korakakis, Michalis
Vlachos, Andreas
Weller, Adrian
contents Empirical risk minimization (ERM) incentivizes models to exploit shortcuts, i.e., spurious correlations between input attributes and labels that are prevalent in the majority of the training data but unrelated to the task at hand. This reliance hinders generalization on minority examples, where such correlations do not hold. Existing shortcut mitigation approaches are model-specific, difficult to tune, computationally expensive, and fail to improve learned representations. To address these issues, we propose InterpoLated Learning (InterpoLL) which interpolates the representations of majority examples to include features from intra-class minority examples with shortcut-mitigating patterns. This weakens shortcut influence, enabling models to acquire features predictive across both minority and majority examples. Experimental results on multiple natural language understanding tasks demonstrate that InterpoLL improves minority generalization over both ERM and state-of-the-art shortcut mitigation methods, without compromising accuracy on majority examples. Notably, these gains persist across encoder, encoder-decoder, and decoder-only architectures, demonstrating the method's broad applicability.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_05527
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Mitigating Shortcut Learning with InterpoLated Learning
Korakakis, Michalis
Vlachos, Andreas
Weller, Adrian
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Empirical risk minimization (ERM) incentivizes models to exploit shortcuts, i.e., spurious correlations between input attributes and labels that are prevalent in the majority of the training data but unrelated to the task at hand. This reliance hinders generalization on minority examples, where such correlations do not hold. Existing shortcut mitigation approaches are model-specific, difficult to tune, computationally expensive, and fail to improve learned representations. To address these issues, we propose InterpoLated Learning (InterpoLL) which interpolates the representations of majority examples to include features from intra-class minority examples with shortcut-mitigating patterns. This weakens shortcut influence, enabling models to acquire features predictive across both minority and majority examples. Experimental results on multiple natural language understanding tasks demonstrate that InterpoLL improves minority generalization over both ERM and state-of-the-art shortcut mitigation methods, without compromising accuracy on majority examples. Notably, these gains persist across encoder, encoder-decoder, and decoder-only architectures, demonstrating the method's broad applicability.
title Mitigating Shortcut Learning with InterpoLated Learning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05527