arXiv AI By Katie Matton, Rosalind W. Picard, John Guttag, Maggie Makar

Counterfactual Test-Time Augmentation for Shortcut Removal in Language Models

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The paper introduces Counterfactual Test-Time Augmentation (CTTA) to mitigate shortcut exploitation in large language models. CTTA generates counterfactual edits of an input using an auxiliary model, then averages the LLM’s predictions across these edits, with theoretically optimal weights derived from the training distribution. The authors propose Select-CTTA, which selects among CTTA variants based on tests for assumption violations, and demonstrate that it outperforms other test-time methods and rivals models fine‑tuned on shortcut‑balanced data.

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