In NLP, models trained via Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) often exploit spurious correlations, such as dialectal markers, at the expense of robust linguistic features, thereby degrading their out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization. Invariant Risk Minimization (IRM) aims to suppress such shortcuts by identifying predictive relationships that remain stable across environments, but its practical utility for NLP remains debated.
研究方法与核心实验结果
We use a causality-driven framework to evaluate IRM under three shortcut-generating mechanisms: label-generated features, confounding, and selection bias. Our results show that IRM successfully rejects shortcuts across the evaluated causal and anti-causal structures, including under limited environmental variation and increasing label noise.
扩展场景实验分析
We then extend our analysis beyond controlled synthetic artifacts to two less constrained settings: gender-profession associations in Bias in Bios and semantically loaded actor-name shortcuts in ActorCorr. These experiments show that invariant learning can mitigate more realistic textual shortcuts, while semantically meaningful features require careful calibration of the invariance penalty.