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CURE: Controlled Unlearning for Robust Embeddings -- Mitigating Conceptual Shortcuts in Pre-Trained Language Models

Created by
  • Haebom

Author

Aysenur Kocak, Shuo Yang, Bardh Prenkaj, Gjergji Kasneci

Outline

This paper presents CURE, a novel lightweight framework for addressing concept-based spurious correlations that compromise the robustness and fairness of pre-trained language models. CURE extracts concept-irrelevant representations through a dedicated content extractor and reversal network, minimizing the loss of task-relevant information. A controllable debiasing module then fine-tunes the influence of residual conceptual cues using contrastive learning, allowing the model to either reduce harmful biases or leverage beneficial correlations appropriate for the target task. Evaluated on the IMDB and Yelp datasets using three pre-trained architectures, CURE improved the F1 score by 10 points on IMDB and 2 points on Yelp, while minimizing computational overhead. This study presents a flexible, unsupervised learning-based design for addressing conceptual bias, paving the way for more reliable and fair language understanding systems.

Takeaways, Limitations

Takeaways:
Presenting an effective, lightweight framework for addressing the conceptual bias problem in pre-trained language models.
Demonstrates significant performance improvements on IMDB and Yelp datasets.
A flexible, unsupervised learning-based approach that offers applicability to a wide range of tasks.
High practical applicability due to low computational overhead
Limitations:
Further experiments are needed to evaluate the generalization performance of the proposed method.
The need for an analysis of the effects of various types of conceptual biases.
Further research is needed to determine whether performance optimization is feasible for specific datasets.
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