arXiv:2604.07692cs.LG2026-04ACL

让多模态模型的决策过程可审计,只用少量关键证据就能解释预测。

Tree-of-Evidence: Efficient "System 2" Search for Faithful Multimodal Grounding

论文配图:Tree-of-Evidence: Efficient "System 2" Search for Faithful Multimodal Grounding
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 用树状搜索+轻量证据瓶颈,找支撑预测的关键数据单元
  • 仅需5个证据单元,保持98%以上模型准确率
  • 适合医疗等高风险场景,能看清模型何时依赖生理数据或文本

大型多模态模型(LMMs)在医疗等高风险领域表现优异,但其推理过程不透明。现有可解释性方法如注意力机制或事后显著性分析,难以真实反映模型在融合时间序列与文本等异构模态时的决策逻辑。本文提出树状证据(Tree-of-Evidence, ToE),一种推理时的离散优化搜索算法,将可解释性建模为选择最优证据子集的问题。ToE通过轻量级证据瓶颈对数据粗粒度单元(如生命体征窗口、报告句子)打分,并采用束搜索策略,找出能复现模型预测的最小证据集合。在六个任务上评估,涵盖MIMIC-IV的四个临床预测任务、eICU跨中心验证及LEMMA-RCA非临床故障检测。ToE生成可审计的证据链,同时保持预测性能——在所有设置中,使用不超过五个证据单元即可保留超过0.98的全模型AUROC。在证据稀疏条件下,ToE比其他方法更具决策一致性且概率保真误差更低。定性分析显示,ToE会动态调整策略:简单病例仅依赖生命体征,而当生理信号模糊时则主动引入文本信息。因此,ToE为多模态模型提供了实用的审计机制,清晰揭示每个预测背后的离散证据来源。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) achieve state-of-the-art performance in high-stakes domains like healthcare, yet their reasoning remains opaque. Current interpretability methods, such as attention mechanisms or post-hoc saliency, often fail to faithfully represent the model's decision-making process, particularly when integrating heterogeneous modalities like time-series and text. We introduce Tree-of-Evidence (ToE), an inference-time search algorithm that frames interpretability as a discrete optimization problem. Rather than relying on soft attention weights, ToE employs lightweight Evidence Bottlenecks that score coarse groups or units of data (e.g., vital-sign windows, report sentences) and performs a beam search to identify the compact evidence set required to reproduce the model's prediction. We evaluate ToE across six tasks spanning three datasets and two domains: four clinical prediction tasks on MIMIC-IV, cross-center validation on eICU, and non-clinical fault detection on LEMMA-RCA. ToE produces auditable evidence traces while maintaining predictive performance, retaining over 0.98 of full-model AUROC with as few as five evidence units across all settings. Under sparse evidence budgets, ToE achieves higher decision agreement and lower probability fidelity error than other approaches. Qualitative analyses show that ToE adapts its search strategy: it often resolves straightforward cases using only vitals, while selectively incorporating text when physiological signals are ambiguous. ToE therefore provides a practical mechanism for auditing multimodal models by revealing which discrete evidence units support each prediction.

多模态可解释性医疗AI证据搜索

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