Abstract:Shortcut mitigation strategies commonly rely on training data annotations, group-balanced held-out data or the presence of all groups, i.e., all combinations of (spurious) attributes and classes, in the training data. However, these requirements are rarely met in practice. We instead propose a method for targeted model analysis to identify a small set of instances in which the model relies on spurious attributes. Using that set and following ``this feature should not be used for prediction'' reasoning, we identify highly relevant neurons in an intermediate layer and regularize their impact. This ensures that models learn to depend on informative features rather than being right for the wrong reasons, thereby improving robustness without requiring additional balanced held-out data or annotations.
| Comments: | preprint |
| Subjects: | Machine Learning (cs.LG) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2605.13340 [cs.LG] |
| (or arXiv:2605.13340v1 [cs.LG] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.13340 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) |
Submission history
From: Phuong Quynh Le [view email]
[v1]
Wed, 13 May 2026 11:00:12 UTC (24,042 KB)