Prevalence calibration as shortcut mitigation

๐Ÿ“… 2026-09-07
๐Ÿ“ˆ Citations: 0
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๐Ÿค– AI Summary
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๐Ÿ“ Abstract
Shortcut learning denotes the widespread situation in which a classifier exploits spurious correlations rather than diagnostic features. Existing mitigation strategies mostly aim to learn shortcut-invariant representations; their empirical success is limited and they cannot be applied to classifiers using frozen foundation model encoders. We propose to reframe shortcut learning as fundamentally a calibration problem: unconstrained learning implicitly calibrates each shortcut group to its training set disease prevalence, rendering the resulting classifier necessarily over-confident in one group and under-confident in the other. Building on this insight, we prevalence-equalize calibration between shortcut groups through two encoder-agnostic methods, an in-processing regularizer and a post-hoc prevalence-equalized recalibration step. Across chest-drain-pneumothorax benchmarks on CheXpert and SIIM-ACR, spanning fine-tuned CNNs and frozen foundation-model backbones, both methods substantially outperform all baselines. Post-hoc recalibration of a standard ERM-trained DenseNet raises misaligned-group AUROC from 0.23 to 0.73, indicating that shortcut reliance degrades the classification head rather than the underlying representation. Besides two new state-of-the-art shortcut mitigation approaches, our findings more fundamentally connect shortcut learning to calibration theory and algorithmic fairness.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

shortcut learning
spurious correlations
classifier
frozen foundation model encoders
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

prevalence calibration
shortcut learning
encoder-agnostic methods
calibration problem
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M
Mohamed Amine Kina
Universitรคt Bremen, Bremen, Germany
E
Eike Petersen
Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Medicine MEVIS, Bremen, Germany