通过反事实推理消除视觉语言模型的上下文偏见,提升零样本识别可靠性。
Representation-Level Counterfactual Calibration for Debiased Zero-Shot Recognition
- 在表示空间中合成对象与不同背景的反事实嵌入,模拟环境变化下的预测。
- 无需重训练,在多个基准上同时提升最差组和平均准确率,达新最优水平。
- 轻量级框架适合部署,为多模态推理提供可解释的因果校准路径。
物体-上下文捷径仍是视觉语言模型的顽疾,当测试场景与训练时的共现模式不一致时,会损害零样本识别的可靠性。本文将该问题重新建模为因果推断任务:若物体出现在不同环境中,其预测是否仍成立?为在推理阶段回答此问题,我们在CLIP的表示空间中估计物体与背景的期望,并通过外部数据集、批次邻居或文本描述采样多样化背景,重组生成反事实嵌入。通过估计总直接效应并模拟干预,进一步减去仅由背景激活的部分,保留有益的物体-上下文交互,同时缓解幻觉得分。无需重训练或提示设计,该方法在依赖上下文的基准上显著提升最差组与平均准确率,建立新的零样本最优性能。此外,本框架提供一种轻量级的表示级反事实方法,为无偏且可靠的多模态推理开辟实用的因果路径。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Object-context shortcuts remain a persistent challenge in vision-language models, undermining zero-shot reliability when test-time scenes differ from familiar training co-occurrences. We recast this issue as a causal inference problem and ask: Would the prediction remain if the object appeared in a different environment? To answer this at inference time, we estimate object and background expectations within CLIP's representation space, and synthesize counterfactual embeddings by recombining object features with diverse alternative contexts sampled from external datasets, batch neighbors, or text-derived descriptions. By estimating the Total Direct Effect and simulating intervention, we further subtract background-only activation, preserving beneficial object-context interactions while mitigating hallucinated scores. Without retraining or prompt design, our method substantially improves both worst-group and average accuracy on context-sensitive benchmarks, establishing a new zero-shot state of the art. Beyond performance, our framework provides a lightweight representation-level counterfactual approach, offering a practical causal avenue for debiased and reliable multimodal reasoning.
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