Binesh Sadanandan PhD Dissertation Companion
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Thrust 5 · Chapter 7

Deployment

Can uncertainty and audit signals identify predictions that should be escalated?

One forward pass is enough to rank flip risk. Predictive entropy predicts paraphrase flips at an AUROC of 0.823 and errors at 0.862 for Targeted LoRA on the PadChest flip bank, and it carries across architectures: LLaVA-Rad LoRA reaches 0.830 on PadChest and 0.905 on MIMIC. The gate is an offline readiness audit: its region term needs a radiologist's bounding box that no undiagnosed patient has, so that term cannot run online, though the MIMIC configuration, where the rule already reduces to paraphrase agreement plus an image-swap check, is deployable as written. And what it admits is mostly what the question text already answers: on the slice where text and image disagree, Targeted LoRA scores 2.9%.

How this thrust was run

Compare uncertainty methods (softmax entropy, Monte Carlo dropout, deep ensemble, temperature scaling) for flip and error prediction, calibration, corruption stress, and descriptive conformal coverage, then evaluate a multi-signal admit rule combining paraphrase agreement, swap sensitivity, and region evidence.

Datasets
MIMIC-CXR, PadChest
Models
MedGemma-4B, Targeted LoRA, Full LoRA, LLaVA-Rad, LLaVA-Rad LoRA, Qwen2-VL
Thesis tables
tab:bridge_auroc, tab:gate_results, tab:conformal_shift, tab:clean_calibration

Confirmed Yes: single-pass predictive entropy predicts paraphrase flips (AUROC 0.823) as well as errors (AUROC 0.862) on PadChest, and the flip bridge replicates across architectures (LLaVA-Rad LoRA 0.830 PadChest, 0.905 MIMIC).

Negative result No. Gates admit the cases the text already answers over the ones grounded in the image. Admitted-case accuracy does rise, to 96.8% against 91.5% for Targeted LoRA on PadChest. Yet that same model scores 2.9% on the slice where text and image disagree, and Qwen2-VL gets 0 of 279 such questions right under every rule tried.

Negative result No: no single internal monitor transfers across model families. Gemma, LLaVA-Rad, and Qwen2-VL each require different monitors, and the multi-pass alternatives fail in family-specific ways: adapter-only Monte Carlo dropout is an uninformative epistemic probe and the MedGemma deep ensemble collapses out of distribution.

The gate, in one picture

question

model
answer+ entropy, AUROC 0.823
audit rule

Admitted cases are ones the question text already answers: on the slice where text and image disagree, accuracy is 2.9%.

Try this thrust yourself

Both signals in this chapter are interactive. Drag the entropy threshold and watch coverage trade against error, then switch the audit rule's conditions off and on and see what each one admits. Both run on the same 861 questions this chapter reports.

The entropy demo The audit demo

Primary results

0.823

question-level

Single-pass entropy predicts paraphrase flips (AUROC 0.823)

Softmax predictive entropy from one forward pass predicts whether a prediction will flip under paraphrasing with AUROC 0.823 for Targeted LoRA on PadChest: uncertainty is a deployable single-pass proxy for paraphrase fragility.

Targeted LoRA · PadChest · n = 861 · 95% CI [0.778, 0.864]; p = 4.3e-29

Source, denominator, and limits
Metric
flip-prediction AUROC from softmax predictive entropy
Denominator
question-level (per question)
Sample
n = 861
Model
Targeted LoRA
Dataset
PadChest
Split
ood
Comparison
operator-preserving slice 0.826 (95% CI [0.780, 0.870]); deep ensemble 0.552; cross-architecture LLaVA-Rad LoRA 0.830 (PadChest) / 0.905 (MIMIC)
Uncertainty
95% CI [0.778, 0.864]; p = 4.3e-29
Thesis
Chapter 7, tab:bridge_auroc
Paper
Predictive Entropy as a Joint Screen for Error and Paraphrase Instability in Medical Vision-Language Models
Source artifact
dissertation/tables/thrust4/table_bridge_auroc.tex
Last verified
2026-07-15

33.0% admitted at 96.8% accuracy

question-level

The readiness audit admits 33.0% of Targeted LoRA PadChest predictions at 96.8% accuracy

The deployment-readiness rule (paraphrase agreement AND image reliance) admits 33.0% of Targeted LoRA's PadChest predictions, and the admitted slice is 96.8% accurate versus 91.5% unfiltered, with a 4.2% residual flip rate on uninspected paraphrases.

Targeted LoRA · PadChest · n = 861

Source, denominator, and limits
Metric
admission rate of the offline readiness audit
Denominator
question-level (per question)
Sample
n = 861
Model
Targeted LoRA
Dataset
PadChest
Split
ood
Comparison
accuracy 96.8% gated vs 91.5% on all; Base admits 41.6% (96.9% gated), Full LoRA 26.7% (83.9% gated)
Uncertainty
not reported for this value
Thesis
Chapter 7, tab:gate_results
Paper
Source artifact
dissertation/tables/thrust4/table_gate_results.tex
Last verified
2026-07-15

2.9%

question-level

2.9% accuracy on the slice where the image should matter

Targeted LoRA scores only 2.9% accuracy on the PadChest text-disagrees slice - the cases where the image-conditioned answer must depart from the text-only answer - so gates raise admitted-case accuracy by selecting text-answerable cases over image-grounded ones (RQ5.3 = no).

Targeted LoRA · PadChest · n = 241

Source, denominator, and limits
Metric
accuracy on the text-disagrees slice
Denominator
question-level (per question)
Sample
n = 241
Model
Targeted LoRA
Dataset
PadChest
Split
ood
Comparison
the strict gating rule raises this only to 25.0% at 2% intra-slice coverage; Qwen2-VL gets 0 of 279 text-disagrees questions correct under every evaluated rule
Uncertainty
not reported for this value
Thesis
Chapter 7
Paper
Source artifact
dissertation/chapters/06_thrust5.tex
Last verified
2026-07-15

0.0001

question-level

Adapter-only Monte Carlo dropout detects almost no epistemic uncertainty (MI = 0.0001 nats)

Monte Carlo dropout on the LoRA adapters yields mean mutual information of 0.0001 nats for Targeted LoRA on PadChest: the perturbation barely moves the model, so the probe detects almost none of the predictive entropy as epistemic.

Targeted LoRA · PadChest · n = 861

Source, denominator, and limits
Metric
mean mutual information (epistemic component) under Monte Carlo dropout, p = 0.05 on adapters
Denominator
question-level (per question)
Sample
n = 861
Model
Targeted LoRA
Dataset
PadChest
Split
ood
Comparison
deep ensemble mean MI 0.057 nats, but that signal is corrupted by member OOD failure; Monte Carlo dropout flip AUROC equals plain softmax entropy (0.823 vs 0.823)
Uncertainty
not reported for this value
Thesis
Chapter 7
Paper
Predictive Entropy as a Joint Screen for Error and Paraphrase Instability in Medical Vision-Language Models
Source artifact
dissertation/chapters/06_thrust5.tex
Last verified
2026-07-15

52.0% worst member vs 92.1% best

question-level

Deep ensemble fails out-of-distribution: worst member at 52.0% accuracy

The five-seed LoRA deep ensemble fails on PadChest: per-member accuracy spans 52.0% (seed 456) to 92.1% (seed 42), and the ensemble's selective prediction collapses to AURC 0.130 versus 0.019 for single-pass entropy, admitting only 23.8% of cases at 5% risk versus 88.5%.

Targeted LoRA · PadChest · n = 861 · member accuracies 52.0 / 67.1 / 68.5 / 78.7 / 92.1% across the 5 seeds

Source, denominator, and limits
Metric
worst ensemble-member accuracy on PadChest
Denominator
question-level (per question)
Sample
n = 861
Model
Targeted LoRA
Dataset
PadChest
Split
ood
Comparison
best member (seed 42) 92.1%; ensemble AURC 0.130 vs 0.019 single-pass entropy; probability averaging recovers 72.6% aggregate accuracy but not a usable confidence ranking
Uncertainty
member accuracies 52.0 / 67.1 / 68.5 / 78.7 / 92.1% across the 5 seeds
Thesis
Chapter 7
Paper
Predictive Entropy as a Joint Screen for Error and Paraphrase Instability in Medical Vision-Language Models
Source artifact
results/uai/revision/ensemble_diagnostics.json
Last verified
2026-07-15

Charts from this thrust

Open any of these in the evidence explorer to filter by model, dataset, or metric.

Predictive entropy of stable versus flipped predictions

Targeted LoRA on the 861-question PadChest flip bank: 747 stable questions and 114 that flipped under paraphrase.

Predicting a paraphrase flip from uncertainty on the original question

Targeted LoRA on the 861-question PadChest flip bank (temperature scaling on the 732-question subset that survives its 15% calibration holdout). AUROC for predicting whether the question will flip.

Risk-coverage: what accepting fewer predictions buys you

PadChest flip bank, n=861 questions per model. Selective risk (error rate among accepted) against coverage, ranking by softmax confidence, for base MedGemma-4B, Targeted LoRA and Full LoRA. Curves recomputed from the post-image-fix run and downsampled to 50 points each.

Offline readiness audit: admission rate against accuracy

Six cells: base MedGemma-4B, Targeted LoRA and Full LoRA on the MIMIC-CXR flip bank (n=98) and the PadChest flip bank (n=861). The audit admits a prediction only if the first two paraphrases agree with the original and the answer shows image reliance.

Does failure detection survive image corruption?

AUGRC against corruption severity (0 = clean, then 1/3/5 averaged over five corruption types) on the 861-question PadChest flip bank, softmax entropy, for base MedGemma-4B, Targeted LoRA and Full LoRA. Bars are bootstrap 95% intervals. Lower is better.

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