Consistency and Uncertainty: Identifying Unreliable Responses From
  Black-Box Vision-Language Models for Selective Visual Question Answering
Zaid Khan Yun Fu
The goal of selective prediction is to allow an a model to abstain when it
may not be able to deliver a reliable prediction, which is important in
safety-critical contexts. Existing approaches to selective prediction typically
require access to the internals of a model, require retraining a model or study
only unimodal models. However, the most powerful models (e.g. GPT-4) are
typically only available as black boxes with inaccessible internals, are not
retrainable by end-users, and are frequently used for multimodal tasks. We
study the possibility of selective prediction for vision-language models in a
realistic, black-box setting. We propose using the principle of
\textit{neighborhood consistency} to identify unreliable responses from a
black-box vision-language model in question answering tasks. We hypothesize
that given only a visual question and model response, the consistency of the
model's responses over the neighborhood of a visual question will indicate
reliability. It is impossible to directly sample neighbors in feature space in
a black-box setting. Instead, we show that it is possible to use a smaller
proxy model to approximately sample from the neighborhood. We find that
neighborhood consistency can be used to identify model responses to visual
questions that are likely unreliable, even in adversarial settings or settings
that are out-of-distribution to the proxy model.