Know What You do Not Know: Verbalized Uncertainty Estimation Robustness on Corrupted Images in Vision-Language Models
Mirko Borszukovszki, Ivo Pascal De Jong, Matias Valdenegro-Toro
Abstract
To leverage the full potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) it is crucial to have some information on their answers’ uncertainty. This means that the model has to be able to quantify how certain it is in the correctness of a given response. Bad uncertainty estimates can lead to overconfident wrong answers undermining trust in these models. Quite a lot of research has been done on language models that work with text inputs and provide text outputs. Still, since the visual capabilities have been added to these models recently, there has not been much progress on the uncertainty of Visual Language Models (VLMs). We tested three state-of-the-art VLMs on corrupted image data. We found that the severity of the corruption negatively impacted the models’ ability to estimate their uncertainty and the models also showed overconfidence in most of the experiments.- Anthology ID:
- 2025.trustnlp-main.16
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Trustworthy NLP (TrustNLP 2025)
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2025
- Address:
- Albuquerque, New Mexico
- Editors:
- Trista Cao, Anubrata Das, Tharindu Kumarage, Yixin Wan, Satyapriya Krishna, Ninareh Mehrabi, Jwala Dhamala, Anil Ramakrishna, Aram Galystan, Anoop Kumar, Rahul Gupta, Kai-Wei Chang
- Venues:
- TrustNLP | WS
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 247–265
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.trustnlp-main.16/
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Mirko Borszukovszki, Ivo Pascal De Jong, and Matias Valdenegro-Toro. 2025. Know What You do Not Know: Verbalized Uncertainty Estimation Robustness on Corrupted Images in Vision-Language Models. In Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Trustworthy NLP (TrustNLP 2025), pages 247–265, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Know What You do Not Know: Verbalized Uncertainty Estimation Robustness on Corrupted Images in Vision-Language Models (Borszukovszki et al., TrustNLP 2025)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.trustnlp-main.16.pdf