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Poster
in
Workshop: 2nd Workshop on Test-Time Adaptation: Putting Updates to the Test (PUT)

Causal Fine-Tuning of Pre-trained Language Models for Robust Test Time Adaptation

Jialin Yu · Yuxiang Zhou · Yulan He · Nevin Zhang · Junchi Yu · Phil Torr · Ricardo Silva

[ ] [ Project Page ]
Fri 18 Jul 11:15 a.m. PDT — noon PDT

Abstract:

Fine-tuning pre-trained language models (PLMs) with supervised data improves performance, but often fails to generalise under unknown distribution shifts, as models tend to rely on spurious, non-causal features. Existing approaches typically make restrictive assumptions or require multi-domain data, limiting their applicability in real-world, single-domain settings. We propose a novel causal adjustment framework that improves out-of-distribution generalisation by decomposing the representation of PLMs into causal and spurious components, and recombine them for testing time adaptation. Extensive experiments on semi-synthetic datasets demonstrate that our causal fine-tuning method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art domain generalisation baselines.

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