Understanding Rare Spurious Correlations in Neural Networks

Neural networks are known to use spurious correlations for classification; for example, they commonly use background information to classify objects. But how many examples does it take for a network to pick up these correlations? This is the question that we empirically investigate in this work. We introduce spurious patterns correlated with a specific class to a few examples and find that it takes only a handful of such examples for the network to pick up on the spurious correlation. Through extensive experiments, we show that (1) spurious patterns with a larger $\ell_2$ norm are learnt to correlate with the specified class more easily; (2) network architectures that are more sensitive to the input are more susceptible to learning these rare spurious correlations; (3) standard data deletion methods, including incremental retraining and influence functions, are unable to forget these rare spurious correlations through deleting the examples that cause these spurious correlations to be learnt. Code available at https://github.com/yangarbiter/rare-spurious-correlation.