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Hauptverfasser: Bender, Sidney, Morik, Marco
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.21851
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author Bender, Sidney
Morik, Marco
author_facet Bender, Sidney
Morik, Marco
contents Foundation models, despite their robust zero-shot capabilities, remain vulnerable to spurious correlations and 'Clever Hans' strategies. Existing mitigation methods often rely on unavailable group labels or computationally expensive gradient-based adversarial optimization. To address these limitations, we propose Visual Disentangled Diffusion Autoencoders (DiDAE), a novel framework integrating frozen foundation models with disentangled dictionary learning for efficient, gradient-free counterfactual generation directly for the foundation model. DiDAE first edits foundation model embeddings in interpretable disentangled directions of the disentangled dictionary and then decodes them via a diffusion autoencoder. This allows the generation of multiple diverse, disentangled counterfactuals for each factual, much faster than existing baselines, which generate single entangled counterfactuals. When paired with Counterfactual Knowledge Distillation, DiDAE-CFKD achieves state-of-the-art performance in mitigating shortcut learning, improving downstream performance on unbalanced datasets.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_21851
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Visual Disentangled Diffusion Autoencoders: Scalable Counterfactual Generation for Foundation Models
Bender, Sidney
Morik, Marco
Machine Learning
Foundation models, despite their robust zero-shot capabilities, remain vulnerable to spurious correlations and 'Clever Hans' strategies. Existing mitigation methods often rely on unavailable group labels or computationally expensive gradient-based adversarial optimization. To address these limitations, we propose Visual Disentangled Diffusion Autoencoders (DiDAE), a novel framework integrating frozen foundation models with disentangled dictionary learning for efficient, gradient-free counterfactual generation directly for the foundation model. DiDAE first edits foundation model embeddings in interpretable disentangled directions of the disentangled dictionary and then decodes them via a diffusion autoencoder. This allows the generation of multiple diverse, disentangled counterfactuals for each factual, much faster than existing baselines, which generate single entangled counterfactuals. When paired with Counterfactual Knowledge Distillation, DiDAE-CFKD achieves state-of-the-art performance in mitigating shortcut learning, improving downstream performance on unbalanced datasets.
title Visual Disentangled Diffusion Autoencoders: Scalable Counterfactual Generation for Foundation Models
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.21851