Identifying and Mitigating Spurious Correlations for Improving Robustness in NLP Models

Recently, NLP models have achieved remarkable progress across a variety of tasks; however, they have also been criticized for being not robust. Many robustness problems can be attributed to models exploiting spurious correlations, or shortcuts between the training data and the task labels. Models may fail to generalize to out-of-distribution data or be vulnerable to adversarial attacks if spurious correlations are exploited through the training process. In this paper, we aim to automatically identify such spurious correlations in NLP models at scale. We first leverage existing interpretability methods to extract tokens that significantly affect model's decision process from the input text. We then distinguish "genuine" tokens and "spurious" tokens by analyzing model predictions across multiple corpora and further verify them through knowledge-aware perturbations. We show that our proposed method can effectively and efficiently identify a scalable set of "shortcuts", and mitigating these leads to more robust models in multiple applications.