When Prompts Ignore Structure: Graph-Based Attribute Reasoning for Calibrated VLMs

Reliable confidence estimation remains a key limitation of test-time adaptation in vision-language models (VLMs), where prompt tuning improves zero-shot accuracy but often degrades calibration due to entropy-driven overconfidence.

Prior approaches mitigate this using LLM-derived class attributes and contrastive regularization, yet treat attributes independently, ignoring their relational structure.

We propose ARGTCA, which represents (class, attribute) pairs as nodes in a Symbolic Attribute Graph and trains a Graph Attention Network (GAT) using contrastive objectives to produce structurally informed embeddings that capture inter-attribute dependencies.

We introduce two attribute selection strategies: ARGTCA-DIV for intra-class diversity and ARGTCA-DISC for inter-class discrimination.

Experiments across nine benchmarks show that ARGTCA-DIV reduces average Expected Calibration Error (ECE) by approximately ~37% over baselines, while ARGTCA-DISC consistently performs as the second-best variant, reducing average ECE by approximately ~17% over baselines.

These results suggest that modeling symbolic attribute interactions provides a principled approach for reliable test-time adaptation in VLMs.