Prevalence calibration as shortcut mitigation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.07922v1
• Date: Mon, 07 Sep 2026 19:38:20 GMT
• Title: Prevalence calibration as shortcut mitigation
• Abstract summary: Shortcut learning denotes the widespread situation in which a classifier exploits spurious correlations rather than diagnostic features.<n>We show that 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.
• Score: 1.8620637029128548
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• 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.

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