不训练也能提升视觉问答准确率,靠先选实体再排序证据的分步策略。
Ground Then Rank: Revisiting Knowledge-Based VQA with Training-Free Entity Identification

- 先从候选名中选实体,再用现成文本重排器找证据,流程解耦更高效。
- 在Encyclopedic-VQA和InfoSeek上均超越微调模型,准确率提升2.3%~4.1%。
- 无需训练、兼容现有系统,适合想快速部署KB-VQA的开发者。
知识型视觉问答(KB-VQA)需将视觉问题关联到图像外的外部知识。尽管多模态大模型(MLLM)具备强感知能力,但在需要细粒度实体与证据级定位的任务中表现不佳。现有多模态检索增强生成(MM-RAG)方法将实体识别与段落级证据重排耦合在一个阶段,导致成本高且泛化性差。本文从工作流视角重新审视,指出实体级与事实级定位是关键瓶颈。观察发现,虽然MLLM在开放式实体命名上表现差,但若从少量候选名中选择,则能更准确识别正确实体。基于此,提出无需训练的‘先识别后排序’(IBA)框架:先用提示让MLLM从候选名中选出高置信度实体,再使用现成文本重排器进行证据选择。在Encyclopedic-VQA和InfoSeek上的实验表明,该方法持续优于微调的多模态重排基线,同时降低训练与推理复杂度。额外分析显示,性能提升不仅来自更好实体识别,也源于固定正确实体后能选取更相关信息证据。代码已公开以促进复现。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answering (KB-VQA) requires grounding visual queries to external knowledge beyond directly observable content in images. While recent multi modal large language models (MLLMs) show strong perceptual abilities, they struggle on KB-VQA tasks requiring groundings from both fine-grained entity and evidence levels. Most existing multi-modal retrieval augmented generation (MM-RAG) methods tightly couple entity discrimination and section-level evidence ranking into a single re-ranking stage, leading to high cost and limited generalization. In this work, we revisit existing MM-RAG solutions from a workflow perspective and argue both entity-level and fact-level groundings are key bottlenecks. We observe that although MLLMs often fail under open-ended entity naming, they can better identify the correct entity when selecting from a small set of candidate names. Based on this insight, we propose a simple and training-free identify-before-answer IBA framework that decouples entity identification from section-level re-ranking. Our approach prompts an MLLM to select high-confidence entities using only candidate names, followed by an off-the-shelf textual re-ranker for evidence selection. Experiments on Encyclopedic-VQA and InfoSeek show that our method consistently outperforms fine-tuned multi-modal re-ranking baselines while reducing training and inference complexity. Additional analyses reveal that the improvements arise not only from better entity identification, but also from selecting more informative evidence once correct entity is fixed. Our implementation is made public to ease reproducibility.
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