Measuring and Mitigating Shortcut Reliance in Language Models with Probe-Based Representation Entanglement (2026.acl-srw)
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| Challenge: | Shortcut learning remains a major obstacle to robust NLP systems. |
| Approach: | They propose to fine-tune Gemma 3 1B Instruct and Llama 3.2 1B on two synthetic sentiment shortcuts in SST-2 and one natural shortcut in MNLI based on lexical overlap. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on two synthetic sentiment shortcuts and one natural shortcut in MNLI with a 99% shortcut ratio, while Gemma drops from 91.8% to 60.2%. |
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| Challenge: | Language models (LMs) often rely on spurious correlations rather than causally relevant features to improve accuracy and generalizability. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that categorizes shortcuts into occurrence, style, and concept . they aim to explore the nuanced ways shortcuts influence the performance of LMs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark categorizes shortcuts into occurrence, style, and concept . it systematically investigates models’ resilience and susceptibilities to sophisticated shortcuts . |
Do LLMs Overcome Shortcut Learning? An Evaluation of Shortcut Challenges in Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in various tasks, but may rely on dataset biases as shortcuts for prediction. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a test suite to evaluate the impact of shortcuts on LLMs' performance. |
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Towards Interpreting and Mitigating Shortcut Learning Behavior of NLU models (2021.naacl-main)
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Mengnan Du, Varun Manjunatha, Rajiv Jain, Ruchi Deshpande, Franck Dernoncourt, Jiuxiang Gu, Tong Sun, Xia Hu
| Challenge: | Recent studies indicate that NLU models are prone to rely on shortcut features for prediction, without achieving true language understanding. |
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Exploring and Mitigating Shortcut Learning for Generative Large Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent large language models (LLMs) have incredible instruction-following capabilities while maintaining strong task completion ability. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to encourage LLMs to Forget Spurious correlations and Learn from In-context information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can mitigate shortcut learning by forging spurious correlations and learning from in-context information. |
Mitigating Shortcuts in Language Models with Soft Label Encoding (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that large language models rely on spurious correlations in the data for natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for debiasing shortcuts and a dummy class to encode shortcuts into a model and use it to generate soft labels. |
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Mitigating Shortcut Learning with InterpoLated Learning (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing shortcut mitigation approaches are model-specific, difficult to tune, computationally expensive, and fail to improve learned representations. |
| Approach: | They propose to interpolate representations of majority examples to include features from intra-class minority examples with shortcut-mitigating patterns. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves minority generalization over ERM and state-of-the-art mitigation methods on multiple natural language understanding tasks while preserving accuracy on majority examples. |
Supervised and Unsupervised Probing of Shortcut Learning: Case Study on the Emergence and Evolution of Syntactic Heuristics in BERT (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Contemporary language models (LMs) rely on shortcut learning, using superficial cues that are spuriously correlated with labels. |
| Approach: | They propose to use syntactic heuristics to learn shortcuts in BERT when performing a task in Natural Language Understanding to investigate where these shortcuts emerge, how they evolve and how they impact the latent knowledge of the LM. |
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Improving the robustness of NLI models with minimax training (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that our method consistently outperforms other robustness enhancement techniques on out-of-distribution adversarial test sets, while maintaining high in-distance accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a minimax objective between a learner model being trained for the task and an auxiliary model aiming to maximize the learner's loss by up-weighting underrepresented "hard" examples with patterns that contradict the shortcuts learned from the prevailing "easy" examples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms other robustness enhancement techniques on out-of-distribution adversarial test sets while maintaining high in-distance accuracy. |
Mitigating Shortcut Learning via Smart Data Augmentation based on Large Language Model (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve shortcut learning performance are limited by manual definition of shortcuts and inherent confirmation bias during model training. |
| Approach: | They propose a method of Smart Data Augmentation based on Large Language Models to identify shortcuts and generate their anti-shortcut counterparts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method shows an improvement of 5.61% across various natural language processing tasks. |
Large Language Models Can be Lazy Learners: Analyze Shortcuts in In-Context Learning (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown great potential for in-context learning, but their robustness and performance on downstream tasks remains limited. |
| Approach: | They propose to examine the reliance of LLMs on shortcuts or spurious correlations within prompts for downstream tasks and find larger models are more likely to utilize shortcuts in prompts during inference. |
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