Attribution-Guided Masking for Robust Cross-Domain Sentiment Classification

TL;DR

This paper introduces Attribution-Guided Masking (AGM), a training method that improves cross-domain sentiment classification by reducing reliance on domain-specific tokens, enhancing generalization without target labels.

Contribution

The paper proposes AGM, a novel attribution-guided masking technique that dynamically penalizes spurious tokens during fine-tuning, improving zero-shot transfer performance and interpretability.

Findings

AGM achieves competitive transfer accuracy compared to strong baselines.

AGM suppresses attribution on domain-specific tokens like mentions and hashtags.

Removing attribution-guided masking degrades transfer performance.

Abstract

While pre-trained Transformer models achieve high accuracy on in-domain sentiment classification, they frequently experience severe performance degradation when transferring to out-of-domain data. We hypothesize that this generalization gap is driven by reliance on domain-specific spurious tokens. After demonstrating that post-hoc-token-level attribution drift fails to predict this gap, we propose Attribution-Guided Masking (AGM), a training time intervention that dynamically detects and penalizes highly attributed spurious tokens during fine-tuning. AGM's core component is a gradient based attribution masking loss ($\mathcal{L}_{mask}$), which can optionally be combined with a counterfactual contrastive loss to enforce domain-invariant representations, all without requiring target-domain labels or human annotation. Evaluated in a strict zero-shot transfer setting across four diverse domains with eight random seeds, AGM achieves competitive generalization compared to five strong baselines on the hardest transfer (Sentiment140): $\Delta$ = 0.244 versus DANN (0.264), DRO (0.248), Fish (0.247), and IRM (0.238), while uniquely providing token-level interpretability into which features drive the generalization gap. Our qualitative analysis confirms that AGM suppresses attribution on domain-specific tokens such as @mentions, hashtags, and slang, shifting reliance toward domain-invariant sentiment markers. Our ablation study further confirms that attribution-guided masking is the critical component: removing it or replacing it with random token selection consistently degrades performance on difficult transfers.