提出一套无需微调的可信度评估框架,判断视觉语言模型对物理量预测是否可靠。
Answer-Level Trust Selection for Physical Vision-Language Reasoning

- 通过重复提问与控制干预,生成八项可解释的行为诊断指标。
- 在20个模型上验证,能识别出稳定但错误或依赖文本先验的预测。
- 适合关注模型可靠性而非仅准确率的研究者与应用落地者。
视觉语言模型(VLMs)能够从视觉观测中估计持续时间、速度和加速度等物理量,但现有基准主要评估整体性能与标注真值的对比。在实际部署中,关键问题是:当真实答案不可用时,如何判断单个预测是否可信?仅靠自一致性可能无法捕捉重要失败模式:模型可能产生稳定但错误的估计,或依赖文本先验而非视觉证据。本文提出一种面向定量物理推理的答案级可信度选择(Answer-Level Trust Selection, ATS)框架,为接受或拒绝个体预测提供后处理方案。ATS无需微调、辅助验证器或模型内部逻辑访问,而是基于重复查询与受控干预,聚合八项可解释的行为诊断分数形成统一可信度评分。我们在Qwen2.5-VL-7B及20个VLM骨干模型上进行了深入评估,分析了选择性表现、诊断行为与针对性失败模式。结果表明,基于干预的诊断能有效识别出仅凭重复一致难以发现的稳定但错误和先验跟踪型预测。然而,对错误案例的提升拒识可能以降低正确预测保留率为代价。因此,ATS补充了模型能力评估,提供了针对量化预测的答案级可靠性评估。代码将在发表后公开。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Vision-language models (VLMs) can estimate physical quantities such as duration, speed, and acceleration from visual observations, but existing benchmarks primarily assess overall model performance against annotated ground truth. In deployment, a key question is whether an individual prediction can be trusted when its ground truth is unavailable. Self-consistency alone may fail to capture important failure modes: a VLM may produce stable-but-wrong estimates or rely on textual priors rather than visual evidence. We formulate answer-level selective prediction for quantitative physical reasoning and propose Answer-Level Trust Selection (ATS), a post-hoc, model-agnostic framework for accepting or rejecting individual VLM predictions. ATS requires no fine-tuning, auxiliary verifier, or access to the model's internal logits. Instead, it aggregates eight interpretable behavioral diagnostic scores derived from repeated queries and controlled interventions into a unified trust score. We evaluate ATS in depth on Qwen2.5-VL-7B and across 20 VLM backbones, examining selective performance, diagnostic behavior, and targeted failure modes. Our results show that intervention-based diagnostics help identify stable-but-wrong and prior-tracking predictions that repeated agreement alone may miss. However, improved failure-case rejection can come at the cost of lower retention of correct predictions. ATS therefore complements model-level capability evaluation with answer-level reliability assessment for quantitative VLM predictions. Code will be released upon publication.
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。