通过融合文本、输出置信度和隐藏表征,提升视觉语言模型的不确定性估计性能。
HARMONY: Hidden Activation Representations and Model Output-Aware Uncertainty Estimation for Vision-Language Models
- 结合生成文本、输出置信度与模型内部隐藏表征进行多源信息融合。
- 在A-OKVQA和VizWiz上实现最高5%的AUROC提升与9%的PRR改进。
- 适合关注生成安全性和可靠性评估的研究者与应用开发者。
不确定性估计(UE)在量化模型输出可靠性、通过选择性预测减少不安全生成方面至关重要。现有基于概率的UE方法依赖预定义函数,常通过长度归一化等启发式手段将词元概率聚合为单一评分,但难以捕捉生成词元间的复杂关系,且易受语言先验影响。另一类方法利用模型隐藏表示并训练简单MLP预测不确定性,但常丢失词元间的内在依赖关系。尽管先前研究指出隐藏表示编码了多模态对齐信号,但其处理方式对UE性能有显著影响。为此,本文提出HARMONY框架,通过恰当的输入映射设计与架构选择,整合生成文本('text')、输出层不确定性得分('MaxProb')及模型在词元级别对图像与生成内容的内在信念(由'隐藏表示'捕捉),以有效识别词元间依赖与视觉-文本对齐信号。在两个开放问答基准(A-OKVQA、VizWiz)和四种主流视觉语言模型(LLaVA-7B、LLaVA-13B、InstructBLIP、Qwen-VL)上的实验表明,HARMONY始终优于或匹配现有方法,在AUROC上最高提升5%,在PRR上最高提升9%。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Uncertainty Estimation (UE) plays a central role in quantifying the reliability of model outputs and reducing unsafe generations via selective prediction. In this regard, most existing probability-based UE approaches rely on predefined functions, aggregating token probabilities into a single UE score using heuristics such as length-normalization. However, these methods often fail to capture the complex relationships between generated tokens and struggle to identify biased probabilities often influenced by \textbf{language priors}. Another line of research uses hidden representations of the model and trains simple MLP architectures to predict uncertainty. However, such functions often lose the intricate \textbf{ inter-token dependencies}. While prior works show that hidden representations encode multimodal alignment signals, our work demonstrates that how these signals are processed has a significant impact on the UE performance. To effectively leverage these signals to identify inter-token dependencies, and vision-text alignment, we propose \textbf{HARMONY} (Hidden Activation Representations and Model Output-Aware Uncertainty Estimation for Vision-Language Models), a novel UE framework that integrates generated tokens ('text'), model's uncertainty score at the output ('MaxProb'), and its internal belief on the visual understanding of the image and the generated token (captured by 'hidden representations') at token level via appropriate input mapping design and suitable architecture choice. Our experimental experiments across two open-ended VQA benchmarks (A-OKVQA, and VizWiz) and four state-of-the-art VLMs (LLaVA-7B, LLaVA-13B, InstructBLIP, and Qwen-VL) show that HARMONY consistently matches or surpasses existing approaches, achieving up to 5\% improvement in AUROC and 9\% in PRR.
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