[2604.04518] Reproducibility study on how to find Spurious Correlations, Shortcut Learning, Clever Hans or Group-Distributional non-robustness and how to fix them

Computer Science > Machine Learning arXiv:2604.04518 (cs) [Submitted on 6 Apr 2026] Title:Reproducibility study on how to find Spurious Correlations, Shortcut Learning, Clever Hans or Group-Distributional non-robustness and how to fix them Authors:Ole Delzer, Sidney Bender View a PDF of the paper titled Reproducibility study on how to find Spurious Correlations, Shortcut Learning, Clever Hans or Group-Distributional non-robustness and how to fix them, by Ole Delzer and 1 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are increasingly utilized in high-stakes domains like medical diagnostics and autonomous driving where model reliability is critical. However, the research landscape for ensuring this reliability is terminologically fractured across communities that pursue the same goal of ensuring models rely on causally relevant features rather than confounding signals. While frameworks such as distributionally robust optimization (DRO), invariant risk minimization (IRM), shortcut learning, simplicity bias, and the Clever Hans effect all address model failure due to spurious correlations, researchers typically only reference work within their own domains. This reproducibility study unifies these perspectives through a comparative analysis of correction methods under challenging constraints like limited data availability and severe subgroup imbalance. We evaluate recently proposed correction methods based on explainable artificial intelligence...