@inproceedings{wu-etal-2025-beyond-spurious,
    title = "Beyond Spurious Signals: Debiasing Multimodal Large Language Models via Counterfactual Inference and Adaptive Expert Routing",
    author = "Wu, Zichen  and
      Huang, Hsiu-Yuan  and
      Wu, Yunfang",
    editor = "Christodoulopoulos, Christos  and
      Chakraborty, Tanmoy  and
      Rose, Carolyn  and
      Peng, Violet",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025",
    month = nov,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Suzhou, China",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/author-page-yu-wang-polytechnic/2025.findings-emnlp.205/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.findings-emnlp.205",
    pages = "3805--3825",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-335-7",
    abstract = "Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown substantial capabilities in integrating visual and textual information, yet frequently rely on spurious correlations, undermining their robustness and generalization in complex multimodal reasoning tasks. This paper addresses the critical challenge of superficial correlation bias in MLLMs through a novel causal mediation-based debiasing framework. Specially, we distinguishing core semantics from spurious textual and visual contexts via counterfactual examples to activate training-stage debiasing and employ a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture with dynamic routing to selectively engages modality-specific debiasing experts. Empirical evaluation on multimodal sarcasm detection and sentiment analysis tasks demonstrates that our framework significantly surpasses unimodal debiasing strategies and existing state-of-the-art models."
}