冻结 InstructBLIP 的可回答性信号分析：视觉依赖不等于可回答

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Abstract:Visual question answering models often produce plausible responses even when the available visual evidence is insufficient to support a valid answer. Although prior work has introduced benchmarks and abstention mechanisms for unanswerable visual questions, it remains unclear which signals derived from a frozen vision-language model reliably indicate answerability on unseen image-question pairs. We systematically evaluate answerability signals on a stratified 10K subset of UNK-VQA using frozen InstructBLIP, covering predictive uncertainty, cross-modal alignment, visual grounding, visual dependence, internal representations, and learned probes. Answerability discrimination remains weak, with test AUROC largely confined to 0.50-0.54. CLIP alignment yields the highest point estimate but does not significantly outperform generation confidence under paired bootstrap analysis. Targeted removal of question-relevant visual evidence causes substantially larger changes in answer confidence than same-size random masking, yet intervention sensitivity provides essentially no answerability discrimination. Increasing probe capacity, combining multiple signals, and adding reason-aware supervision do not provide robust improvements, while post-freeze cross-validation yields similarly weak discrimination. Selective-answering analysis shows limited usable coverage under low-risk operating criteria. Failure-mode analysis shows that the relative utility of individual signals varies across perturbation mechanisms. Taken together, these results show that, on our UNK-VQA subset with frozen InstructBLIP, visual dependence, uncertainty, semantic alignment, and static representations are not robust standalone proxies for answerability. Our findings emphasize the need to distinguish a model's reliance on visual evidence from whether that evidence is sufficient to support an answer.

Submission history

From: Minjun Kim [view email]
[v1] Tue, 13 Oct 2026 07:56:00 UTC (1,340 KB)