Evidence Fusion

Latest papers 17

Sep 22, 2026cs.CL

Count Evidence, Not Sentences: Tempered Evidence Fusion of LLM Judgments for Long-Text Value Measurement

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to measure public value orientations from long social media posts, yet such posts often mix background, quotations, concessions, and only a few stance-bearing sentences. Existing approaches either ask the model to predict a document-level label directly, which can be overconfident, or aggregate sentence-level predictions by majority or soft voting, which treat uncertain and decisive sentences as equally informative. We formulate long-text value measurement as a decision-fusion problem and propose Tempered Evidence Fusion (TEF), a training-free rule that weights each sentence's log-odds by its normalized information gain, as derived from a generalized Bayesian posterior. This makes the fused score nearly vanish for uncertain sentences while preserving the Bayes-optimal weight of decisive evidence. We further introduce Multi-event Insight Network Dimensions (MIND), a benchmark of 8,358 Chinese and English posts spanning five years of public events and six value dimensions. On MIND, TEF outperforms the strongest baseline among Direct, Majority Vote, and Soft Vote by an average of 4.5 accuracy points and 4.6 macro-F1 points across five LLMs and two languages. MIND dataset and code are available at https://github.com/Kzczc/ICASSP2027-TEF.
Sep 16, 2026cs.LG

F-DACE: Fuzzy Disagreement-Aware Causal Evidence Fusion for Abstention-Safe Conversational Retail Decision Support

Observational decision-support systems often expose one causal estimate as a recommendation even when plausible estimators disagree. The inherent engine of the proposed system is causal machine learning: a conditional-average-treatment-effect estimand identified by backdoor adjustment, estimated by an EconML DML causal forest and DoWhy linear regression, checked by two-way fixed effects, and converted into candidate levers by constrained optimisation. F-DACE is the decision layer on that engine. It represents precision, propensity overlap, placebo-refutation stability, interval overlap, and directional agreement as fuzzy memberships. Hard vetoes force abstention after estimand mismatch, failed diagnostics, informative sign conflict, or weak evidence. In 180 panel simulations spanning six identification conditions, F-DACE made a decision in 67.2% of runs and limited false recommendations to 17.2%; the corresponding rates were 33.3% for the causal forest and 35.6% for backdoor regression, matching deterministic unanimity rather than dominating it. Nearly all (30 of 31) false recommendations occurred under shared unmeasured confounding, which no fusion rule can diagnose when every component shares the omitted variable. The retail application aggregates a public Walmart panel to 6,435 store-weeks across 45 stores. F-DACE abstains for all five markdown indicators: some estimates are imprecise, one refutation fails, and MarkDown5 has a direct sign conflict. A LangGraph conversational agent exposes impact, what-if, and lever-optimization tools while a deterministic verifier preserves causal-layer status. On 24 live questions it achieved 100.0% tool-routing accuracy, 100.0% status fidelity, and 0.983 mean groundedness. On ten adversarial questions it resisted all injected instructions.
Sep 1, 2026cs.CV

Evidential Deep Learning for Multi-Modal Anti-UAV Detection

Anti-UAV systems increasingly fuse multiple sensors, yet their detection heads provide no per-modality reliability signal. This study evaluates whether evidential deep learning (EDL) heads, Dempster-Shafer (DS) evidence fusion, and uncertainty-driven temporal sensor gating improve anti-UAV detection through a controlled ablation on three benchmarks: thermal tracking (AntiUAV600), RGB-audio-RF classification (TRIDENT), and RGB-IR tracking (MM-UAV). The EDL training objective improves accuracy over retrained sigmoid baselines (+5.9 percentage points in accuracy and a tripled tracker-on-absent rate in E1; +4.8 percentage points in classification accuracy in E2, surviving a clip-clustered bootstrap, p = 0.011) and ranks classification errors substantially better (entropy UAUC approximately 0.94 vs. 0.51). The remaining components do not support their respective hypotheses. DS fusion does not outperform simple probability averaging. Dirichlet vacuity adds no ranking power beyond predictive entropy and inverts at the detection level, where extreme background imbalance causes it to encode class membership rather than error likelihood, a failure also observed for entropy and sigmoid confidence. Temporal gating preserves accuracy only when nearly inactive and yields no realised latency saving on shared-backbone hardware. The benefit of evidential learning therefore arises primarily from its training objective rather than its uncertainty estimate; a crop-level control further localises the detection-level breakdown to anchor-level evaluation rather than the learned representation.
Aug 13, 2026cs.AI

Robust Dempster-Shafer Evidence Fusion with Chaos-Conflict Measurement and Historical-Experience Weighting

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.
Aug 4, 2026cs.CV

Multimodal Skin Lesion Classification with Swin Transformer and Clinical Metadata Fusion

Skin lesion classification plays an important role in supporting the early diagnosis of skin cancer. However, automated analysis remains challenging due to class imbalance, inter-class similarity, and intra-class variability in dermoscopic images. This paper proposes a multimodal classification framework that combines Swin Transformer-based image features with structured clinical metadata to improve diagnostic performance through integrated visual-context learning. Experiments on a publicly available dataset show that the proposed model achieves a test accuracy of 92.55% and a macro F1-score of 91.33%, with strong performance across minority classes. Temperature scaling is applied as a post-hoc calibration method, resulting in a reduction in expected calibration error and improving prediction reliability, while uncertainty estimation is incorporated to further assess the confidence of model predictions. Qualitative explainability analysis further shows that the model focuses on lesion regions during inference. Therefore, the results demonstrate that multimodal fusion, combined with calibration and interpretability analysis, provides an effective and trustworthy approach for automated skin lesion classification.
Jul 31, 2026cs.CV

OSEF: One-Step Evidence Fusion for Cross-Video Scene Procedure Planning

Video Scene Procedure Planning (VSPP) supplies the target start-goal observations in advance, leaving open how a planner should act when the evidence must itself be retrieved. We introduce Cross-Video Scene Procedure Planning (CVSPP): given an answer-redacted start-goal query and K candidate videos, a model must retrieve the supporting video, localize the relevant window, and predict the action sequence. Two obstacles couple here. Same-task demonstrations share stages and windows, and an early hard selection passes the wrong scene chain to the planner. We build an eleven-source benchmark with typed negative roles, a fail-closed answer-leakage gate, and separate Evidence- and Plan-axis metrics. On its 14 source-horizon cells we adapt nine planner families against a majority-sequence floor. We then present One-Step Evidence Fusion (OSEF), which scores a query-conditioned cell-and-span lattice over all candidates and feeds the full soft lattice to the planner through a token-global adapter, cropping no window beforehand. OSEF ranks first on all six cells the benchmark certifies as method-rankable. On four matched same-task COIN and CrossTask cells it improves exact-video-and-plan success by 2.9-10.7 points over an enhanced hard-selection SOTA, and a component study assigns the largest single increment to the token-global interface. Five converted-source cells sit at or near the majority-sequence floor, the benchmark's remaining headroom. The supplementary package includes model constructors and evaluation code.
Jul 28, 2026cs.CV

ReLATE: Reliability-Guided Evidence Fusion for Robust UAV--Satellite cross-view Geo-Localization

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-satellite cross-view geo-localization matches UAV images against satellite imagery and has achieved impressive accuracy on clean (non-degraded) image benchmarks. In real-world flights, however, UAV observations are frequently affected by adverse weather, illumination changes, platform motion, sensor noise, and compression, while the robustness of existing methods under such degradations remains largely unexamined. In this paper, we present UAVSat-Deg, a large-scale robustness benchmark for degraded UAV-satellite geo-localization, comprising University-1652-Deg and SUES-200-Deg. UAVSat-Deg covers 27 corruption types, including 19 core and 8 compound corruptions, at three severity levels, supports bidirectional drone-to-satellite and satellite-to-drone retrieval as well as multi-height UAV acquisition, and contains more than 11.7 million pre-generated corrupted test images. Benchmarking representative methods under this protocol reveals substantial robustness gaps, particularly under severe and compound corruptions. To address this problem, we propose ReLATE, a Reliable Evidence Learning framework with Adaptive Token Evidence Regulation, which realizes reliability-adaptive feature fusion during descriptor construction. ReLATE estimates a structure-smoothed reliability field over visual tokens, aggregates trustworthy local evidence, and adaptively integrates it into query-derived representations; the regulated query representations are then combined with the CLS-token and GeM-pooled branches to form the final cross-view descriptor. Across both test sets and retrieval directions, ReLATE achieves the best average corrupted-test performance among the compared methods while maintaining competitive accuracy on clean images. The code and dataset will be available at https://github.com/JHC626/ReLATE.
Jul 20, 2026cs.LG

Trustworthy Protein-Ligand Binding Affinity Prediction via Reliability-Aware Multi-Engine Fusion

Accurate protein-ligand binding affinity prediction is central to computational drug discovery, yet modern docking engines frequently disagree without indicating which prediction to trust. Consensus scoring and ensemble methods improve mean accuracy but treat all predictions identically without interpretable confidence measures or uncertainty decomposition, ignoring the chemical context of each protein-ligand pair. To address this limitation, we introduce RELIABLE-BA (RELIABiLity-aware Evidential fusion for Binding Affinity), an evidential framework for multi-engine binding affinity prediction. Our model comprises three steps: (1) modeling each engine as an evidential expert via Normal-Inverse-Gamma distributions, (2) scaling epistemic uncertainty through learned reliability from molecular context while preserving each expert's predictive mean, and (3) fusing experts through closed-form aggregation that captures both individual uncertainty and inter-engine disagreement. Experiments on the PDBBind and BDB2020+ benchmarks demonstrate competitive point prediction with substantially improved uncertainty calibration, and additional validation on the SARS-CoV-2 Mpro dataset and 5HT2A receptor demonstrates applicability to clinically relevant drug targets. Crucially, these uncertainty estimates enable reliable filtering of protein-ligand pairs, reducing prediction error by up to 25% when retaining only high-confidence pairs. To our knowledge, RELIABLE-BA is the first multi-engine binding affinity prediction framework to combine evidential fusion with context-dependent reliability, offering a principled path toward trustworthy AI-guided drug discovery. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/yongchand/RELIABLE-BA.
Jul 13, 2026cs.AI

PREF-Gate: Provenance-Constrained Relational Evidence Fusion with Validation-Gated Selection for Graph Fraud Detection

Relational fraud detection can exploit both label-free graph context and label-derived neighborhood evidence, but these two information sources obey different validity conditions. In particular, neighborhood risk becomes invalid when a queried node's own label, or any validation or test label, enters its construction. We formulate this issue as provenance-constrained relational evidence use and present PREF-Gate, an auditable decision framework with two fixed experts and a finite validation gate. The context expert uses attributes, one-hop means, feature residuals, and degree descriptors without labels. The evidence expert adds self-excluded, training-label-only neighborhood risk and empirical-Bayes summaries that expose support, uncertainty, availability, and shrinkage. Before test inference, the gate selects either expert or one of three pre-specified probability mixtures and fixes the decision threshold. On Amazon, YelpChi, and TFinance, using five identical stratified splits and 14 same-protocol methods, PREF-Gate obtains mean AUPRC values of 0.9085, 0.8104, and 0.8913. It selects the label-free expert on all Amazon and YelpChi splits and an evidence mixture on all TFinance splits. Thus, the main result is conditional rather than universal: label-derived relational evidence is useful only where held-out validation supports it. The framework couples competitive ranking performance with an explicit label-provenance contract, finite selection policy, failure accounting, and review-budget evaluation, providing an auditable knowledge-based decision pipeline for graph fraud detection.
Jul 13, 2026cs.CV

TC-MAF: Train-Calibrated Bounded Multi-Evidence Fusion for Multimodal Industrial Anomaly Detection

Multimodal anomaly detection benefits from complementary RGB and 3D evidence, yet auxiliary RGB reconstruction is not equally reliable across product categories and class-wise test-time policy selection is usually unavailable. We propose TC-MAF, a base-anchored multi-evidence fusion design that combines a multimodal detector, complementary Dinomaly evidence, and a small cross-modal consistency cue under one fixed pixel-level fusion formula. A lightweight training-dispersion confidence (TDC) term scales auxiliary participation using only normal training statistics. On MVTec-3D, TC-MAF reaches 0.979 image-level AUROC and 0.990 pixel-level AUPRO, achieving the best mean results on both detection and localization among the compared multimodal methods. Systematic ablations show that the fusion structure itself is the dominant factor, while TDC provides a smaller but reproducible calibration gain over no calibration or arbitrary calibration. Additional experiments show that the same design remains effective under a pooled-statistics variant, auxiliary-branch and backbone substitutions, few-shot settings, a missing-3D setting, and cross-dataset evaluation on Eyecandies. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/TC_MAF-C3BB.
Jun 28, 2026cs.CV

VCS-SLAM: Geometry-Validated Semantic Evidence Fusion for 3D Gaussian SLAM

Visual SLAM performance often deteriorates in complex real-world applications. Semantic 3D Gaussian SLAM commonly fuses 2D semantic priors into a persistent 3D map using uniform optimization weights. However, such priors are not equally reliable in online mapping: occlusions, unsupported semantic boundaries, and ambiguous ray geometry can introduce persistent semantic artifacts into the global Gaussian map. We propose VCS-SLAM, a geometry-validated semantic evidence fusion framework for RGB-D 3D Gaussian SLAM. Instead of treating all semantic observations as uniformly valid supervision, VCS-SLAM evaluates their geometric reliability through visibility consistency, surface-supported boundary evidence, and ray-level conflict uncertainty. The resulting reliability-aware objective suppresses occluded semantic updates, reduces unsupported semantic bleeding, and delays premature label assignment in ambiguous regions. Experiments on Replica demonstrate improved semantic consistency, boundary preservation, and reconstruction quality. Results on ScanNet further show that VCS-SLAM maintains competitive tracking performance under real RGB-D inputs
Jun 18, 2026cs.CV

Semantic-Anchored Evidential Fusion for Domain-Robust Whole-Slide Survival Analysis

Whole-slide images (WSIs) are widely used for computational cancer prognosis. However, most existing methods primarily focus on in-domain performance and fail to generalize across clinical centers. This limitation stems from their reliance on pixel-derived representations that are highly susceptible to domain-specific artifacts caused by staining protocols and scanner hardware. We hypothesize that high-level pathology semantics, such as tumor grade and micro-environmental architecture, provide a domain-invariant semantic representation that mirrors the robust diagnostic logic of human pathologists. Therefore, we propose a Semantic-Anchored Evidential Fusion Survival (SAEFS) framework, where SAEFS derives semantic anchors from WSIs via Visual Question Answering (VQA), employs a dual-stream WSI evidence extraction architecture, uses Dirichlet-based Subjective Logic to model uncertainty, and fuses semantic and visual evidence through a cautious conjunction rule to avoid overconfident fusion from correlated sources. Trained exclusively on one source domain and evaluated zero-shot across four unseen domains, SAEFS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models both in prediction accuracy and reliability, improving the average C-index by 10.2%. Quantitative analyses further show that VQA-derived semantic features exhibit significantly lower cross-center divergence than pixel-derived features, highlighting their robustness for cross-center clinical applications.
May 16, 2026cs.AI

Evidential Information Fusion on Possibilistic Structure

Dempster's rule is a fundamental tool for combining belief functions from distinct and reliable sources. However, its intersection-based semantics imposes strong structural restrictions, which limits its flexibility in handling complex source states and diverse information fusion scenarios. To overcome this limitation, we propose a reversible transformation, derived from the isopignistic principle, between belief functions and a possibilistic structure defined on the power set. In this transformation, the relationships among subsets are explicitly characterized by a belief evolution network, which provides a more flexible representation of evidential information beyond the conventional mass function structure. On this basis, we further introduce the triangular norm family to develop a general and adaptive evidential information fusion framework. Unlike fusion methods rooted in Dempster semantics, the proposed framework supports more flexible combination behaviors and exhibits advantages in non-distinct source fusion, conflict management, parametric combination design, and heterogeneous information fusion.
May 12, 2026cs.CV

FRAME: Forensic Routing and Adaptive Multi-path Evidence Fusion for Image Manipulation Detection

The proliferation of sophisticated image editing tools and generative artificial intelligence models has made verifying the authenticity of digital images increasingly challenging, with important implications for journalism, forensic analysis, and public trust. Although numerous forensic algorithms, ranging from handcrafted methods to deep learning-based detectors, have been developed for manipulation detection, individual methods often suffer from limited robustness, fragmented evidence, or weak generalization across manipulation types and image conditions. To address these limitations, we present \textbf{FRAME}, a method for \textbf{F}orensic \textbf{R}outing and \textbf{A}daptive \textbf{M}ulti-path \textbf{E}vidence fusion for image manipulation detection. FRAME organizes diverse forensic algorithms into a multi-path analysis space, adaptively selects informative forensic paths for each input image, and fuses complementary evidence to improve detection and localization performance. By moving beyond single-method analysis and fixed fusion strategies, FRAME provides a more robust and flexible approach to image forensic reasoning while preserving interpretable forensic cues from multiple evidence sources. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of FRAME across diverse manipulation scenarios. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/kzhao5/FRAME}{https://github.com/kzhao5/FRAME}.
May 6, 2026cs.CL

Beyond Semantics: An Evidential Reasoning-Aware Multi-View Learning Framework for Trustworthy Mental Health Prediction

Automated mental health prediction using textual data has shown promising results with deep learning and large language models. However, deploying these models in high-stakes real-world settings remains challenging, as existing approaches largely rely on semantic representations and often produce overconfident predictions under ambiguous, noisy, or shifted data. Moreover, most methods lack reliable uncertainty estimation, undermining trust in risk-sensitive mental health applications. To address these limitations, we formulate the task as a multi-view learning problem that integrates semantic information from encoder-only models with higher-level reasoning information from decoder-only models, where reasoning-aware representations and uncertainty modeling are obtained in a trustworthy manner. To ensure reliable fusion, we adopt an evidential learning framework based on Subjective Logic to explicitly model uncertainty and introduce an evidential fusion strategy that balances complementary views while discounting unreliable evidence. Benchmarking on three real-world datasets, Dreaddit, SDCNL, and DepSeverity, reports accuracies of 0.835, 0.731, and 0.751, respectively, demonstrating its potential for reliable mental health prediction. Additional experiments on robustness to noise and case studies for interpretability confirm that our proposed framework not only improves predictive performance but also provides trustworthy uncertainty estimates and human-understandable reasoning signals, making it suitable for risk-sensitive applications in mental health assessment.
Mar 24, 2026cs.CV

AgentFoX: LLM Agent-Guided Fusion with eXplainability for AI-Generated Image Detection

The realism of AI-generated images (AIGI) poses increasing challenges for reliable forensic detection, where heterogeneous expert detectors may produce conflicting predictions across diverse generative sources and post-processing conditions. Existing multi-expert fusion methods rely on fixed rules or learned fusion strategies, offering limited ability to assess sample-specific reliability, execute rigorous adjudication of conflicts, and provide evidence-grounded explanations. We propose AgentFoX, an LLM-driven agentic multi-expert framework for AIGI detection that employs a command-and-reasoning core to perform evidence fusion. Following predefined guidelines, the core coordinates designated subtasks to collect semantic and signal-level evidence, reason over structured contexts to determine authenticity, and generate an auditable report for explainability. During this process, Expert Profiles are constructed for model-centric reliability assessment, while Clustering Profiles are built for data-centric contextual analysis, jointly establishing evidence contexts for conflict resolution. Extensive evaluations across diverse benchmarks demonstrate the robustness and generalizability of AgentFoX under complex conditions.
Date pendingcs.LG

Are Independently Estimated View Uncertainties Comparable? Unified Routing for Trusted Multi-View Classification

Trusted multi-view classification typically relies on a view-wise evidential fusion process: each view independently produces class evidence and uncertainty, and the final prediction is obtained by aggregating these independent opinions. While this design is modular and uncertainty-aware, it implicitly assumes that evidence from different views is numerically comparable. In practice, however, this assumption is fragile. Different views often differ in feature space, noise level, and semantic granularity, while independently trained branches are optimized only for prediction correctness, without any constraint enforcing cross-view consistency in evidence strength. As a result, the uncertainty used for fusion can be dominated by branch-specific scale bias rather than true sample-level reliability. To address this issue, we propose Trusted Multi-view learning with Unified Routing (TMUR), which decouples view-specific evidence extraction from fusion arbitration. TMUR uses view-private experts and one collaborative expert, and employs a unified router that observes the global multi-view context to generate sample-level expert weights. Soft load-balancing and diversity regularization further encourage balanced expert utilization and more discriminative expert specialization. We also provide theoretical analysis showing why independent evidential supervision does not identify a common cross-view evidence scale. Extensive experiments on 14 datasets and comparisons with 15 recent baselines demonstrate that TMUR consistently improves both classification performance and reliability. Code is available at https://github.com/YilinZhang107/TMUR.