# A Variational Approach for Mitigating Entity Bias in Relation Extraction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11381 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.11381/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Jun 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Entity-Based Knowledge Conflicts in Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05052/) (2021)
- [LUKE: Deep Contextualized Entity Representations with Entity-aware Self-attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01057/) (2020)
- [ChatIE: Zero-Shot Information Extraction via Chatting with ChatGPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10205/) (2023)
- [Graph Convolution over Pruned Dependency Trees Improves Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.10185/) (2018)
- [Entity-Relation Extraction as Multi-Turn Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05529/) (2019)
- [BioRED: A Rich Biomedical Relation Extraction Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04263/) (2022)
- [Thinking about GPT-3 In-Context Learning for Biomedical IE? Think Again](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08410/) (2022)
- [An Improved Baseline for Sentence-level Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01373/) (2021)
- [Learning from Context or Names? An Empirical Study on Neural Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01923/) (2020)
- [Are ChatGPT and GPT-4 General-Purpose Solvers for Financial Text Analytics? A Study on Several Typical Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05862/) (2023)
- [Aligning Instruction Tasks Unlocks Large Language Models as Zero-Shot Relation Extractors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11159/) (2023)
- [Should We Rely on Entity Mentions for Relation Extraction? Debiasing Relation Extraction with Counterfactual Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03784/) (2022)
- [Causal Prompting: Debiasing Large Language Model Prompting based on Front-Door Adjustment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02738/) (2024)
- [Deceptive Semantic Shortcuts on Reasoning Chains: How Far Can Models Go without Hallucination?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09702/) (2023)
- [Extracting or Guessing? Improving Faithfulness of Event Temporal Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04992/) (2022)
- [How Fragile is Relation Extraction under Entity Replacements?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13551/) (2023)
- [Consistent Document-Level Relation Extraction via Counterfactuals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06699/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Mitigating entity bias is a critical challenge in Relation Extraction (RE), where models often rely excessively on entities, resulting in poor generalization. This paper presents a novel approach to address this issue by adapting a Variational Information Bottleneck (VIB) framework. Our method compresses entity-specific information while preserving task-relevant features. It achieves state-of-the-art performance on relation extraction datasets across general, financial, and biomedical domains, in both indomain (original test sets) and out-of-domain (modified test sets with type-constrained entity replacements) settings. Our approach offers a robust, interpretable, and theoretically grounded methodology.