{"paper":{"title":"SGD Provably Prioritizes a Shortcut Spurious Feature in the XOR Model","license":"http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["cs.LG"],"primary_cat":"stat.ML","authors_text":"Tyler LaBonte, Vidya Muthukumar","submitted_at":"2026-06-29T15:17:16Z","abstract_excerpt":"Neural networks are known to be susceptible to over-reliance on spurious correlations. However, the precise mechanism by which models exploit shortcut features is not fully understood, and algorithms to mitigate this behavior rely on as yet unjustified assumptions about the learned representations. In this work, we provide the first end-to-end theoretical characterization of spurious feature learning for two-layer ReLU neural networks trained by online minibatch SGD on the logistic loss. We consider data drawn from the high-dimensional Boolean hypercube with a quadratic signal function (namely"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2606.30444","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2606.30444/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}