The Clever Hans Mirage: A Comprehensive Survey on Spurious Correlations in Machine Learning

Understand

Back in the early 20th century, a horse named Hans appeared to perform arithmetic and other intellectual tasks during exhibitions in Germany, while it actually relied solely on involuntary cues in the body language from the human trainer.

• Modern machine learning models are no different.
• These models are known to be sensitive to spurious correlations between non-essential features of the inputs (e.g., background, texture, and secondary objects) and the corresponding labels.
• Such features and their correlations with the labels are known as "spurious" because they tend to change with shifts in real-world data distributions, which can negatively impact the model's generalization and robustness.