让提示优化器学会看图,提升多模态任务准确率
Are Prompt Optimizers Blind? Cross-Modal Visual Feedback for Automatic Prompt Optimization

- 用视觉诊断阶段分析失败图像,定位视觉错误根源
- 生成可复用的视觉盲区模式,平均提升2.4分,最高6.5分
- 优化后提示可直接部署,无需额外计算开销,适合实际应用
自动提示优化(APO)广泛用于适配视觉语言模型(VLMs)至下游任务,无需更新权重,效果显著。然而在多模态任务中,其性能受限于盲反馈通道:优化器仅读取问题、预测和真实答案,无法访问模型出错时的输入图像,因而难以诊断基于视觉的错误。为此,我们提出跨模态视觉反馈(CMVF)。CMVF包含两个阶段:(1) 失败条件下的视觉诊断阶段,更强的优化器在无预测与标签信息下分析每张失败图像;(2) 误差感知聚合阶段,将这些观察结果压缩为可复用的任务级视觉盲区模式,驱动提示重写。关键在于,图像仅在优化阶段使用;部署模型为普通文本提示,推理成本与纯文本基线一致。在12个VQA数据集和4个目标VLM上的实验表明,CMVF持续领先,平均超越最强基线2.4分,单个基准最高提升6.5分。此外,优化器自发形成专家式视觉检查清单,可跨模型迁移而无需重新优化。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Automatic prompt optimization (APO) has been widely adopted to adapt vision-language models (VLMs) to downstream tasks without weight updates, yielding promising results. However, on multimodal tasks, the effectiveness of APO is fundamentally bottlenecked by a blind feedback channel: the optimizer reads the question, the prediction, and the gold answer, but never the input image on which the model failed, and therefore cannot diagnose visually grounded errors. As a remedy, we introduce Cross-Modal Visual Feedback (CMVF). CMVF incorporates (1) a failure-conditioned visual diagnosis stage, in which a stronger optimizer VLM inspects each failed image without access to predictions or labels, and (2) an error-aware aggregation stage that compresses these observations into reusable, task-level visual blind-spot patterns that drive the prompt rewrite. Crucially, the image is consumed only during optimization; the deployed artifact is an ordinary text prompt that runs at the same inference cost as any text-only baseline. Extensive results across 12 VQA datasets and 4 target VLMs demonstrate that CMVF consistently ranks first, improving over the strongest baseline on every target by 2.4 points on average, with gains of up to 6.5 points on individual benchmarks. Moreover, the optimizer self-organizes into expert-style visual checklists that transfer across models without re-optimization.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。