自动发现并验证文本分类器中的虚假捷径,提升模型鲁棒性。
UNMASK: Discovering and Causally Verifying Spurious Shortcuts in Text Classifiers
- 全自动化发现文本表面模式,无需人工标注特征
- 通过反事实干预验证9个(BERT)和6个(RoBERTa)虚假关联
- 适用于无标签数据,可推广至奖励模型分析
在大规模众包语料上训练的神经语言模型常利用与目标标签无关的表面模式获取虚假性能提升,导致在对抗样本或分布外数据上表现不佳。现有方法或需人工指定特征词汇,或仅部分自动化,未能连接数据级相关性与模型级利用。我们提出 UNMASK,一个完全自动化的流水线,无需额外人工标注即可发现、因果验证并缓解文本分类器中的虚假相关性。给定未标注训练样本,UNMASK 生成候选表面模式作为可执行布尔表达式,通过独立复现的统计验证协议筛选,并以经验证的反事实干预建立因果依赖关系。经验证特征作为深度特征重加权的无标签组定义,替代传统 DFR 所需的组标签。应用于 BERT 与 RoBERTa(MNLI 数据集),独立复现了已知的词汇重叠与否定偏见,验证了其中 9 个(BERT)和 6 个(RoBERTa)特征,使 HANS 准确率最高提升 12.58 个百分点。在 CivilComments-WILDS 上,程序化分组达到手标 DFR 的 70.1% 最差组准确率,无需人口统计标注。进一步展示该流程可泛化至奖励模型偏好数据,在 RewardBench2 中揭示可解释的虚假关联。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Neural language models trained on large crowdsourced corpora frequently exploit spurious surface patterns tied to target labels without true linguistic or causal relevance, boosting benchmark performance while failing on adversarial or out-of-distribution inputs. Existing approaches either require manual specification of the feature vocabulary or automate discovery only partially, leaving the gap between dataset-level correlation and model-level exploitation unaddressed. We present U N M ASK, a fully automated pipeline that discovers, causally verifies, and mitigates spurious correlations in text classifiers without additional human annotation. Given unlabeled training examples, U N M ASK generates candidate surface patterns as executable boolean expressions, filters them through a statistical validation protocol with independent replication, and establishes causal model dependence via verified counterfactual interventions. Causally confirmed features then serve as annotation-free group definitions for Deep Feature Reweighting, eliminating the group labels that standard DFR requires. Applied to BERT and RoBERTa trained on MNLI, our pipeline independently rediscovers established lexical-overlap and negation biases, verifying 9 of 10 features on BERT and 6 on RoBERTa, and improving HANS accuracy by up to 12.58 pp. On CivilComments-WILDS, programmatic groups match the 70.1% worst- group accuracy of hand-labeled DFR (Kirichenko et al., 2023) without demographic annotation. We further demonstrate that the discovery and validation stages generalize to reward model preference data, surfacing interpretable spurious correlations in RewardBench2.
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