发现并修复多模态生成中因外部文本引入导致的错误回归现象
The Cost of Context: Mitigating Textual Bias in Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation

- 通过分析注意力机制,揭示视觉信息被抑制与位置偏差导致错误
- 引入精准外部信息后,模型正确预测率反而下降,出现'假性正确'现象
- 提出无需训练的干预方法,有效恢复视觉感知与生成可靠性
尽管多模态大模型(MLLMs)结合检索增强生成(RAG)以减少幻觉,但外部文档的引入可能在实例层面隐藏严重失效模式。我们识别并形式化了‘再污染’现象:即使引入完全准确的‘上帝视角’上下文,模型也会放弃原本正确的预测。通过对内部注意力矩阵的机制诊断,发现再污染由双重注意力坍缩驱动:(1) 视觉盲区,表现为视觉注意力质量(M_vis)和锐度(S_vis)系统性下降;(2) 结构性位置偏差,迫使模型优先关注边界词而非语义相关性。分析揭示‘成功幻觉’——许多看似正确的RAG结果实为位置巧合,仅因文本复制偏好恰好匹配真实位置。为此,我们提出无参数、推理时的瓶颈注意力恢复(BAIR)框架,重建视觉显著性并施加位置感知惩罚。在医学事实性、社会公平性和地理空间基准测试中,BAIR成功恢复多模态对齐,提升诊断可靠性,且无需模型重训练或微调。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly integrated with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to mitigate hallucinations, the introduction of external documents can conceal severe failure modes at the instance level. We identify and formalize the phenomenon of recorruption, where the introduction of even perfectly accurate "oracle" context causes a capable model to abandon an initially correct prediction. Through a mechanistic diagnosis of internal attention matrices, we show that recorruption is driven by a two-fold attentional collapse: (1) visual blindness, characterized by the systemic suppression of visual attention mass ($M_{vis}$) and sharpness ($S_{vis}$), and (2) a structural positional bias that forces the model to prioritize boundary tokens over semantic relevance. Our analysis reveals an Illusion of Success, demonstrating that many seemingly correct RAG outcomes are merely positional coincidences where the model's textual copying bias happens to align with the ground-truth location. To address these vulnerabilities, we propose Bottleneck Attention Intervention for Recovery (BAIR), a parameter-free, inference-time framework that restores visual saliency and applies position-aware penalties to textual distractors. Across medical factuality, social fairness, and geospatial benchmarks, BAIR successfully restores multimodal grounding and improves diagnostic reliability without requiring model retraining or fine-tuning.
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