In this task, you are given the abstract of a research paper. Your task is to generate a summary of this abstract. Your summary should not be very short, but it's better if it's not more than 30 words.

We present local ensembles, a method for detecting extrapolation at test time in a pre-trained model. We focus on underdetermination as a key component of extrapolation: we aim to detect when many possible predictions are consistent with the training data and model class. Our method uses local second-order information to approximate the variance of predictions across an ensemble of models from the same class. We compute this approximation by estimating the norm of the component of a test point's gradient that aligns with the low-curvature directions of the Hessian, and provide a tractable method for estimating this quantity. Experimentally, we show that our method is capable of detecting when a pre-trained model is extrapolating on test data, with applications to out-of-distribution detection, detecting spurious correlates, and active learning.
We present local ensembles, a method for detecting extrapolation in trained models, which approximates the variance of an ensemble using local-second order information.

Developing effective biologically plausible learning rules for deep neural networks is important for advancing connections between deep learning and neuroscience. To date, local synaptic learning rules like those employed by the brain have failed to match the performance of backpropagation in deep networks. In this work, we employ meta-learning to discover networks that learn using feedback connections and local, biologically motivated learning rules. Importantly, the feedback connections are not tied to the feedforward weights, avoiding any biologically implausible weight transport. It can be shown mathematically that this approach has sufficient expressivity to approximate any online learning algorithm. Our experiments show that the meta-trained networks effectively use feedback connections to perform online credit assignment in multi-layer architectures. Moreover, we demonstrate empirically that this model outperforms a state-of-the-art gradient-based meta-learning algorithm for continual learning on regression and classification benchmarks. This approach represents a step toward biologically plausible learning mechanisms that can not only match gradient descent-based learning, but also overcome its limitations.
Networks that learn with feedback connections and local plasticity rules can be optimized for using meta learning.

Despite alarm over the reliance of machine learning systems on so-called spurious patterns in training data, the term lacks coherent meaning in standard statistical frameworks. However, the language of causality offers clarity: spurious associations are those due to a common cause (confounding) vs direct or indirect effects. In this paper, we focus on NLP, introducing methods and resources for training models insensitive to spurious patterns. Given documents and their initial labels, we task humans with revise each document to accord with a counterfactual target label, asking that the revised documents be internally coherent while avoiding any gratuitous changes. Interestingly, on sentiment analysis and natural language inference tasks, classifiers trained on original data fail on their counterfactually-revised counterparts and vice versa. Classifiers trained on combined datasets perform remarkably well, just shy of those specialized to either domain. While classifiers trained on either original or manipulated data alone are sensitive to spurious features (e.g., mentions of genre), models trained on the combined data are insensitive to this signal. We will publicly release both datasets.
Humans in the loop revise documents to accord with counterfactual labels, resulting resource helps to reduce reliance on spurious associations.