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EDCT-Bench: Uncovering Faithfulness Gaps in VLMs via Explanation-Driven Counterfactual Testing

2026-09-16 00:25:31
Sihao Ding, Santosh Vasa, Aditi Ramadwar, Thomas Monninger
arXiv_AI
             
Abstract

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) can produce Natural Language Explanations (NLEs) that sound plausible yet remain inconsistent with the visual evidence they cite. We present Explanation-Driven Counterfactual Testing (EDCT), an intervention-based protocol that extracts visual concepts cited in a model's explanation, applies verified minimal edits to them, and tests whether the resulting answer and explanation remain consistent with the edited image. Using this protocol, we create EDCT-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark spanning three complementary domains: knowledge-intensive visual question answering (OK-VQA), safety-critical driving (DriveLM), and 3D spatial reasoning (3DSRBench). Across the evaluated VLMs, EDCT reveals substantial faithfulness gaps, with models frequently producing responses inconsistent with verified visual changes. Finally, our fine-tuning study suggests that EDCT-generated counterfactuals provide high-impact training signals.

Abstract (translated)

URL

https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.17953

PDF

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2609.17953.pdf

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