# Using Interventions to Improve Out-of-Distribution Generalization of Text-Matching Recommendation Systems

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.10636 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10636/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [Distributionally Robust Neural Networks for Group Shifts: On the Importance of Regularization for Worst-Case Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08731/) (2019)
- [Beyond Accuracy: Behavioral Testing of NLP models with CheckList](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04118/) (2020)
- [Approximate Nearest Neighbor Negative Contrastive Learning for Dense Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00808/) (2020)
- [Robust fine-tuning of zero-shot models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01903/) (2021)
- [Generalizing to Unseen Domains: A Survey on Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03097/) (2021)
- [Fine-Tuning can Distort Pretrained Features and Underperform Out-of-Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.10054/) (2022)
- [Latent Retrieval for Weakly Supervised Open Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00300/) (2019)
- [Pretrained Transformers Improve Out-of-Distribution Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06100/) (2020)
- [Domain Generalization using Causal Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07500/) (2020)
- [Improving Out-of-Distribution Robustness via Selective Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.00299/) (2022)
- [CLEAR: Contrastive Learning for Sentence Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15466/) (2020)
- [Are Graph Augmentations Necessary? Simple Graph Contrastive Learning for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08679/) (2021)
- [Condenser: a Pre-training Architecture for Dense Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08253/) (2021)
- [Pre-training Tasks for Embedding-based Large-scale Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.03932/) (2020)
- [Augmented SBERT: Data Augmentation Method for Improving Bi-Encoders for Pairwise Sentence Scoring Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.08240/) (2020)
- [Domain Generalization by Mutual-Information Regularization with Pre-trained Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10789/) (2022)
- [The elephant in the interpretability room: Why use attention as explanation when we have saliency methods?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05607/) (2020)
- [Self-Supervised Learning for Recommender Systems: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15876/) (2022)
- [The Unfairness of Popularity Bias in Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.13286/) (2019)
- [Diversify and Disambiguate: Learning From Underspecified Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03418/) (2022)
- [Causally motivated Shortcut Removal Using Auxiliary Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06422/) (2021)
- [Contrastive Learning for Debiased Candidate Generation in Large-Scale Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12964/) (2020)
- [ECLARE: Extreme Classification with Label Graph Correlations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00261/) (2021)
- [Adversarial Domain Adaptation for Duplicate Question Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02255/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [CausalSent: Interpretable Sentiment Classification with RieszNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17576/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Given a user's input text, text-matching recommender systems output relevant items by comparing the input text to available items' description, such as product-to-product recommendation on e-commerce platforms. As users' interests and item inventory are expected to change, it is important for a text-matching system to generalize to data shifts, a task known as out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization. However, we find that the popular approach of fine-tuning a large, base language model on paired item relevance data (e.g., user clicks) can be counter-productive for OOD generalization. For a product recommendation task, fine-tuning obtains worse accuracy than the base model when recommending items in a new category or for a future time period. To explain this generalization failure, we consider an intervention-based importance metric, which shows that a fine-tuned model captures spurious correlations and fails to learn the causal features that determine the relevance between any two text inputs. Moreover, standard methods for causal regularization do not apply in this setting, because unlike in images, there exist no universally spurious features in a text-matching task (the same token may be spurious or causal depending on the text it is being matched to). For OOD generalization on text inputs, therefore, we highlight a different goal: avoiding high importance scores for certain features. We do so using an intervention-based regularizer that constraints the causal effect of any token on the model's relevance score to be similar to the base model. Results on Amazon product and 3 question recommendation datasets show that our proposed regularizer improves generalization for both in-distribution and OOD evaluation, especially in difficult scenarios when the base model is not accurate.