发现表格类上下文学习模型会错误依赖设备噪声信号,导致跨医院部署失效。
Entangled by Design: Spurious Intra-Variable Signal Routing in Tabular In-Context Learners
- 模型在混合信号中误选设备噪声而非真实健康信号作为预测依据。
- 上下文越大越强化错误路由,噪声信号影响最大可放大1.74倍。
- 提出两种轻量级方法,使模型重新聚焦真实因果信号,效果提升8.4倍。
考虑一个在单家医院训练的患者康复预测模型,其特征X同时包含真实健康信号C和该医院设备带来的系统性偏差S。在该医院内,这种偏差通过未观测混杂因素(如人口统计)与结果相关;上下文学习者理性地依赖S而非C进行预测,导致在新医院部署时无声失败。本文将此现象形式化为复合表示中的虚假路由:当特征X = [C; αS; η]在不同子空间编码因果信号C与虚假信号S时,上下文学习无法判断哪个驱动预测。我们证明,在岭回归上下文学习下,线性上下文学习者无论上下文大小都不可避免此路由行为;状态领先模型TabPFN也表现出一致的实证行为。推导出闭式表征公式:CSR ∝ ρ_S/ρ_C,线性ICL与TabPFN的相关系数分别达r=0.997和r=0.979。反直觉的是,更大的上下文会加剧对主导信号的锁定,使虚假路由增强最多达1.74倍;在高虚假场景下,更表达力的模型表现出更高脆弱性(高纠缠下+2.22的CSR差距)。提出两种轻量缓解方法:环境分层上下文构建与S-交换增强,仅需弱环境标签且无需因果划分知识。S-交换使线性ICL虚假路由减少74%,TabPFN减少98.8%,同时因果敏感度提升8.4倍——模型非变得无差别,而是重新路由至因果信号。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Consider a model trained at a single hospital to predict patient recovery, where the measured feature $X$ bundles the patient's true health signal ($C$) with a systematic artefact from that hospital's equipment ($S$). Within that hospital, the artefact correlates with outcomes through unmeasured confounders such as patient demographics; an in-context learner rationally routes predictions through $S$, not $C$, and fails silently when deployed at a new hospital with different equipment. We formalise this as \emph{spurious routing in composite representations}: when a feature $X = [C;\,αS;\,η]$ encodes a causal signal $C$ and a spurious signal $S$ in distinct subspaces, the ICL cannot determine which drives predictions. We prove that under ridge ICL, a linear in-context learner, this routing is unavoidable regardless of context size; TabPFN, a state-of-the-art pretrained tabular ICL model, shows qualitatively consistent behaviour empirically. We derive a closed-form characterisation, $\mathrm{CSR} \propto ρ_S/ρ_C$, confirmed at $r = 0.997$ for linear ICL and $r = 0.979$ for TabPFN. Contrary to intuition, larger context sharpens commitment to the dominant in-context signal, amplifying spurious routing by up to $1.74\times$; in the high-spurious corner, more expressive models show greater vulnerability empirically ($+2.22$ CSR gap at high entanglement). We introduce two lightweight mitigations: environment-stratified context construction and S-swap augmentation, that require only weak environment labels and no knowledge of the causal partition. S-swap reduces spurious routing by $74\%$ for linear ICL and $98.8\%$ for TabPFN, with TabPFN's causal sensitivity increasing $8.4\times$ simultaneously: the model does not become agnostic, it reroutes through the causal signal.
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