Adaptive Confidence Regularization for Multimodal Failure Detection

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Liu, Moru, Dong, Hao, Fink, Olga, Trapp, Mario
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Liu, Moru
Dong, Hao
Fink, Olga
Trapp, Mario
author_facet Liu, Moru
Dong, Hao
Fink, Olga
Trapp, Mario
contents The deployment of multimodal models in high-stakes domains, such as self-driving vehicles and medical diagnostics, demands not only strong predictive performance but also reliable mechanisms for detecting failures. In this work, we address the largely unexplored problem of failure detection in multimodal contexts. We propose Adaptive Confidence Regularization (ACR), a novel framework specifically designed to detect multimodal failures. Our approach is driven by a key observation: in most failure cases, the confidence of the multimodal prediction is significantly lower than that of at least one unimodal branch, a phenomenon we term confidence degradation. To mitigate this, we introduce an Adaptive Confidence Loss that penalizes such degradations during training. In addition, we propose Multimodal Feature Swapping, a novel outlier synthesis technique that generates challenging, failure-aware training examples. By training with these synthetic failures, ACR learns to more effectively recognize and reject uncertain predictions, thereby improving overall reliability. Extensive experiments across four datasets, three modalities, and multiple evaluation settings demonstrate that ACR achieves consistent and robust gains. The source code will be available at https://github.com/mona4399/ACR.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_02200
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Adaptive Confidence Regularization for Multimodal Failure Detection
Liu, Moru
Dong, Hao
Fink, Olga
Trapp, Mario
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
The deployment of multimodal models in high-stakes domains, such as self-driving vehicles and medical diagnostics, demands not only strong predictive performance but also reliable mechanisms for detecting failures. In this work, we address the largely unexplored problem of failure detection in multimodal contexts. We propose Adaptive Confidence Regularization (ACR), a novel framework specifically designed to detect multimodal failures. Our approach is driven by a key observation: in most failure cases, the confidence of the multimodal prediction is significantly lower than that of at least one unimodal branch, a phenomenon we term confidence degradation. To mitigate this, we introduce an Adaptive Confidence Loss that penalizes such degradations during training. In addition, we propose Multimodal Feature Swapping, a novel outlier synthesis technique that generates challenging, failure-aware training examples. By training with these synthetic failures, ACR learns to more effectively recognize and reject uncertain predictions, thereby improving overall reliability. Extensive experiments across four datasets, three modalities, and multiple evaluation settings demonstrate that ACR achieves consistent and robust gains. The source code will be available at https://github.com/mona4399/ACR.
title Adaptive Confidence Regularization for Multimodal Failure Detection
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02200