Escaping the SpuriVerse: Can Large Vision-Language Models Generalize Beyond Seen Spurious Correlations?

2025-06-23

AI Summary

This work identifies a critical vulnerability in large vision-language models (LVLMs): during unsupervised pretraining, they readily learn spurious correlations, leading to shortcut reliance on non-essential visual features and undermining robustness in real-world visual question answering (VQA). To address this, the authors introduce SpuriVerse—the first benchmark grounded in empirically mined VQA errors—comprising 124 authentic spurious patterns, along with a counterfactual sample synthesis framework and an LVLM-human collaborative annotation protocol. Evaluating 15 state-of-the-art LVLMs on SpuriVerse reveals that top closed-source models achieve only 37.1% accuracy. In contrast, fine-tuning with spurious-correlation-aware synthetic data boosts performance to 78.40%, demonstrating that such shortcuts are learnable and correctable. This study provides the first systematic quantification of LVLM robustness against spurious correlations, establishing a novel evaluation paradigm and actionable intervention strategy for trustworthy multimodal reasoning.

Technology Category

• Computer Vision: Large Vision Models
• Machine Learning: Large Multimodal Models (LMMs)
• Natural Language Processing: Safety and Robustness

Application Category

• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web learning to rank, online learning, and counterfactual learning for ranking
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Large pretrained models with web data
• Semantics and Knowledge: Methods to enhance, augment, integrate or synergize semantic models such as knowledge graphs and LLMs

Abstract

Finetuning can cause spurious correlations to arise between non-essential features and the target labels, but benchmarks to study these effects involve contrived settings and narrow tasks. In contrast, we consider spurious correlations in multi-modal Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) pretrained on extensive and diverse datasets without explicit task supervision. We develop a benchmark by sourcing GPT-4o errors on real-world visual-question-answering (VQA) benchmarks, then curating a subset through LVLM-human annotation and synthetic counterfactual evaluation to identify errors caused by spurious correlations. This process yields SpuriVerse, a novel benchmark comprised of 124 distinct types of spurious correlations extracted from real-world datasets, each containing 1 realistic and 10 synthetic VQA samples for a total of 1364 multiple choice questions. We evaluate 15 open and closed-source LVLMs on SpuriVerse, finding that even state-of-the-art closed-source models struggle significantly, achieving at best only 37.1% accuracy. Fine-tuning on synthetic examples that emphasize the spurious correlation improves performance to 78.40%, suggesting that training on diverse spurious patterns generalizes to unseen situations: models appear to learn to avoid "shortcuts" and attend to the overall image context.

Problem

• Studying spurious correlations in multi-modal Large Vision-Language Models
• Developing a benchmark to identify real-world spurious correlation errors
• Evaluating LVLM performance and improving generalization via synthetic training

Innovation

• GPT-4o errors sourced for benchmark creation
• Synthetic counterfactual evaluation identifies spurious correlations
• Fine-tuning on diverse spurious patterns improves generalization