提出LeMUQ方法,提升多模态检索增强生成的可信度评估
Uncertainty Quantification for Multimodal Retrieval Augmented Generation
- 通过修改输入模态或检索内容,分析概率信号捕捉多阶段不确定性
- 在多个数据集上平均提升AUROC 3.8%,优于基线与微调方法
- 适合关注多模态生成可靠性、安全性的研究者与开发者
检索增强生成(RAG)通过引入外部知识提升了大语言模型的问答能力,近期已扩展至融合视觉与文本信息的视觉语言模型(VLM)多模态场景。尽管如此,生成答案仍可能错误或误导。不确定性量化(UQ)旨在评估模型输出的可靠性,但现有方法多针对纯文本模型,在多模态RAG中表现不佳。主要挑战在于捕捉检索、视觉理解与生成等多阶段产生的不确定性。本文提出可学习的多模态不确定性量化方法LeMUQ,通过移除模态或检索上下文,分析令牌概率变化,并将这些概率信号编码为概率令牌,经微调模型处理以捕捉模态间与检索间的交互。实验覆盖多种数据集、检索器与VLM,结果一致显示优于基线及微调的UQ方法,平均提升AUROC 3.8%。该方法在不同检索设置和数据集上表现出强泛化能力,跨VLM迁移时结果混合。研究强调建模多模态不确定性的重要性,为更可靠、安全的多模态RAG系统提供支持。代码已开源。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) improves the question answering capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) by incorporating external knowledge and has recently been extended to multimodal settings through Vision-Language Models (VLMs) that integrate visual and textual information. Despite these advances, generated answers can still be incorrect or misleading. Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) methods aim to estimate the reliability of model outputs, but most existing approaches are designed for text-only models and perform poorly in multimodal RAG scenarios. A key challenge is capturing uncertainty arising from multiple stages of the pipeline, including retrieval, visual understanding, and generation. In this work, we show that modeling uncertainty using multimodal and retrieval-aware probability signals improves estimation in multimodal RAG systems. We introduce LeMUQ, a Learnable Multimodal UQ method that analyzes token probabilities under input modifications, such as removing modalities or retrieved context. By encoding these signals as probability tokens and processing them with a finetuned model, our approach captures interactions between modalities and retrieval. Experiments across datasets, retrievers, and VLMs show consistent improvements over baseline and finetuned UQ methods. Our proposed LeMUQ increases the AUROC metric by 3.8% on average. Additionally, our method shows strong generalization performance across different retrieval setups and datasets with mixed results when transferring across different VLMs. Our findings highlight the importance of modeling multimodal uncertainty and provide a step toward more reliable and safer multimodal RAG systems. Code is available on GitHub.
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