A Variational Approach for Mitigating Entity Bias in Relation Extraction

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.

@article{mensah2025_2506.11381,
  title={ A Variational Approach for Mitigating Entity Bias in Relation Extraction },
  author={ Samuel Mensah and Elena Kochkina and Jabez Magomere and Joy Prakash Sain and Simerjot Kaur and Charese Smiley },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.11381},
  year={ 2025 }
}