Papers › Spurious Correlations in Machine Learning: A Survey

Spurious Correlations in Machine Learning: A Survey

20 Feb 2024arXiv:2402.12715archive 2025-07-28

Wenqian Ye, Guangtao Zheng, Xu Cao, Yunsheng Ma, Aidong Zhang

Machine learning systems 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. These 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. In this paper, we provide a review of this issue, along with a taxonomy of current state-of-the-art methods for addressing spurious correlations in machine learning models. Additionally, we summarize existing datasets, benchmarks, and metrics to aid future research. The paper concludes with a discussion of the recent advancements and future challenges in this field, aiming to provide valuable insights for researchers in the related domains.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

wenqian-ye/awesome-spurious-correlations officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubMIT report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Survey

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections