Maxime Peyrard, Sarvjeet Ghotra, Martin Josifoski, Vidhan Agarwal, Barun Patra, Dean Carignan, Emre Kiciman, Saurabh Tiwary, Robert West
| Challenge: | Existing methods to remove spurious correlations and biases involve expensive domain alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for learning invariant representations that generalize better across environments . they adapt a game-theoretic implementation of IRM to language models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can remove structured noise, ignore correlations and achieve better generalization across environments. |
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| Challenge: | Recent work shows that pre-trained language models perform poorly on challenging datasets where spurious correlations do not hold. |
| Approach: | They propose to use multi-task learning to improve generalization from minority examples . they propose to combine MTL with auxiliary tasks to improve performance . |
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End-to-End Bias Mitigation by Modelling Biases in Corpora (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that strong natural language understanding models are prone to relying on unwanted dataset biases without learning the underlying task. |
| Approach: | They propose two learning strategies to train neural models that are more robust to dataset biases and transfer better to out-of-domain datasets. |
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Reinforcement Learning for Aligning Large Language Models Agents with Interactive Environments: Quantifying and Mitigating Prompt Overfitting (2025.findings-naacl)
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Mohamed Salim Aissi, Clément Romac, Thomas Carta, Sylvain Lamprier, Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, Olivier Sigaud, Laure Soulier, Nicolas Thome
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Inverse Reinforcement Learning Meets Large Language Model Alignment (2025.acl-tutorials)
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| Challenge: | This tutorial will provide a comprehensive review of recent advances in LLM alignment . it will highlight the necessity of constructing neural reward models from human data . |
| Approach: | This tutorial will provide a comprehensive review of recent advances in LLM alignment through the lens of inverse reinforcement learning. |
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On Weaponization-Resistant Large Language Models with Prospect Theoretic Alignment (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing safeguards for large language models are inadequate for open-weight models as minimal fine-tuning can bypass them. |
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Toward Inclusive Language Models: Sparsity-Driven Calibration for Systematic and Interpretable Mitigation of Social Biases in LLMs (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a new method to mitigate stereotypical bias in large language models is needed . inherent biases from training on vast Internet datasets can amplify harmful stereotypes . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to identify stereotypical bias in decoder-only transformer models . they apply a localization mechanism that correlates internal activations with a new Context Influence score . |
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Learning Invariant Modality Representation for Robust Multimodal Learning from a Causal Inference Perspective (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multimodal affective computing learn spurious correlations from training data rather than genuine causal relationships, harming generalization under distribution shifts or noisy modalities. |
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Methods for Estimating and Improving Robustness of Language Models (2022.naacl-srw)
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| Challenge: | Large language models suffer from weak generalisation ability due to shallow textual relations over full semantic complexity of the problem. |
| Approach: | They propose to incorporate some of these measures into training objectives to enhance distributional robustness of LLMs. |
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End-to-End Self-Debiasing Framework for Robust NLU Training (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing models incorporate dataset biases leading to strong performance on in-distribution test sets but poor performance on out-of-distortion (OOD) tests. |
| Approach: | They propose a debiasing framework where the shallow representations of the main model are used to derive a bias model and both models are trained simultaneously. |
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Tandem Training for Language Models (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | As language models improve, their actions and reasoning will become difficult or impossible for weaker agents and humans to follow, undermining interpretability and oversight. |
| Approach: | They propose a tandem training paradigm that allows models to adapt their language to weaker partners by intermittently and randomly sampling a frozen weak model instead of the strong model being trained. |
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