Evidential Information Fusion on Possibilistic Structure

Multi-source evidence fusion under Dempster-Shafer theory faces two persistent challenges: existing conflict measures assess inter-evidence inconsistency and intra-evidence uncertainty independently, yielding incomplete evaluations, and current fusion methods evaluate evidence sources exclusively through instantaneous comparisns without exploiting their long-term reliability across diverse decision contexts. This paper proposes a unified evidence reasoning framework that addresses both limitations. Specifically, a chaos-conflict measurement is introduced to jointly quantify cross-evidence conflict and intra-evidence non-specificity, with five formally proven properties ensuring consistent assessment. A historical experience driven weighting scheme partitions the decision space via spectral clustering and applies regret theory to compute context-specific reliability profiles from past fusion outcomes. These mechanisms feed into a hybrid combination rule that adaptively balances uncertainty preservation against weighted consensus, controlled by the global conflict level, followed by a belief-interval decision strategy that enables robust classification without discarding epistemic uncertainty. Experiments on 16 real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves an average F1 score of 85.78 and a mean AUC of 93.30, outperforming eight DST-based baselines and three gradient boosting methods. Ablation analysis confirms the contribution of each component we proposed. The framework offers an effective approach for adaptive evidence fusion in multi-source decision making.

Fuzzy Integral (FI) based aggregation provides a powerful mechanism for nuanced aggregation, for example, in ensemble approaches or decision-level fusion more generally. The main challenge of this approach is the appropriate parametrization of the Fuzzy Measure (FM), which captures the worths of the individual components--and their combinations--which are being fused. Here, widely used approaches including the Sugeno-$λ$ and Decomposable FMs, parametrize the FM by extrapolating from the densities, i.e. the weights associated with individual sources, while respecting the FM's monotonicity constraint. This paper articulates that this information is, in general, insufficient to uniquely identify a discrete FM; but shows how an interval-valued FM can indeed be determined uniquely. We proceed to show how the incorporation of additional information beyond the above, such as the choice of a specific FI and a dataset, then allows for obtaining even more specific interval-valued FMs. In practice, establishing the quality of an empirically determined FM is not trivial. To help address this, we show how the likelihood with which a resulting interval FM encompasses the ideal', i.e. the commonly intangible, best, or ground-truth numeric FM, can be determined, producing a confidence interval at a given confidence level. Finally, based on a series of experiments, we demonstrate empirically that the Choquet FI output based on this FM can also be regarded as the confidence interval for the ideal' information fusion result, providing a novel means to characterize FI fusion outcomes a priori and charting a pathway for future research.

Multimodal fusion requires integrating information from multiple sources that may conflict depending on context. Existing fusion approaches typically rely on static assumptions about source reliability, limiting their ability to resolve conflicts when a modality becomes unreliable due to situational factors such as sensor degradation or class-specific corruption. We introduce C$^2$MF, a context-specfic credibility-aware multimodal fusion framework that models per-instance source reliability using a Conditional Probabilistic Circuit (CPC). We formalize instance-level reliability through Context-Specific Information Credibility (CSIC), a KL-divergence-based measure computed exactly from the CPC. CSIC generalizes conventional static credibility estimates as a special case, enabling principled and adaptive reliability assessment. To evaluate robustness under cross-modal conflicts, we propose the Conflict benchmark, in which class-specific corruptions deliberately induce discrepancies between different modalities. Experimental results show that C$^2$MF improves predictive accuracy by up to 29% over static-reliability baselines in high-noise settings, while preserving the interpretability advantages of probabilistic circuit-based fusion.