EVADE: Evidence-Verified Agentic Diagnosis with Escape
- URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18833v1
- Date: Wed, 19 Aug 2026 11:51:24 GMT
- Title: EVADE: Evidence-Verified Agentic Diagnosis with Escape
- Abstract summary: EVADE is an inferential, non-training method that enhances the safety of deploying a single frozen VLM.<n>It commits only when both the entire image and the zoomed view responses agree.<n>It reduces expected calibration error (ECE) by up to 45% compared to zero-shot.
- Score: 0.880899367147235
- License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
- Abstract: Medical vision-language models (VLMs) can achieve high accuracy but remain unreliable: they are systematically overconfident, benefit little from test-time reasoning, and lack the ability to reliably calibrate trust in their own responses. We introduce EVADE (Evidence-Verified Agentic Diagnosis with Escape), an inferential, non-training method that enhances the safety of deploying a single frozen VLM. EVADE responds and, when uncertain, localises the region most diagnostically relevant, re-answers on a zoomed view, and commits only when both the entire image and the zoomed view responses agree; otherwise, it abstains. To directly address verification hallucination in single-model self-checking, our main idea is to verify gate consistency across different image views rather than re-reading the model's own text. Experimental evaluation on VQA-RAD, SLAKE, and PathVQA using Qwen2.5-VL-7B reports that EVADE is the only method that simultaneously improves both calibration and selective risk while maintaining accuracy, reducing expected calibration error (ECE) by up to 45% compared to zero-shot. Chain-of-thought, self-consistency, and self-verification all fail at least one axis. A grounding analysis reports that self-proposed regions perform better at diagnostic structure localisation than centres or random crops. However, a 7B VLM cannot use this localisation to revise answers. Therefore, reliability gains come from the consistency gate and calibrated abstention.
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