Mitigating Spurious Correlations via Counterfactual Contrastive Learning

Identifying causal relationships rather than spurious correlations between words and class labels plays a crucial role in building robust text classifiers. Previous studies proposed using causal effects to distinguish words that are causally related to the sentiment, and then building robust text classifiers using words with high causal effects. However, we find that when a sentence has multiple causally related words simultaneously, the magnitude of causal effects will be significantly reduced, which limits the applicability of previous causal effect-based methods in distinguishing causally related words from spuriously correlated ones. To fill this gap, in this paper, we introduce both the probability of necessity (PN) and probability of sufficiency (PS), aiming to answer the counterfactual question that ‘if a sentence has a certain sentiment in the presence/absence of a word, would the sentiment change in the absence/presence of that word?’. Specifically, we first derive the identifiability of PN and PS under different sentiment monotonicities, and calibrate the estimation of PN and PS via the estimated average treatment effect. Finally, the robust text classifier is built by identifying the words with larger PN and PS as causally related words, and other words as spuriously correlated words, based on a contrastive learning approach name CPNS is proposed to achieve robust sentiment classification. Extensive experiments are conducted on public datasets to validate the effectiveness of our method.

Citation

F. Cheng, C. Zhou, X. Li, A. Leidinger, H. Li, M. Gong, F. Liu, R. Van Rooij, "Mitigating Spurious Correlations via Counterfactual Contrastive Learning," 2025, pp. 23713-23722.

Source

Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Findings of EMNLP 2025

Conference

30th Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2025

Source

30th Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2025

Publisher

Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)

DOI

10.18653/v1/2025.findings-emnlp.1290

Additional links

https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-emnlp.1290/