# AutoHallusion: Automatic Generation of Hallucination Benchmarks for Vision-Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.10900 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10900/

## Key facts

- Cited by 32 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Hallucination mitigation in LVLMs, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 26 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Jun 2024.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Hallucination mitigation in LVLMs](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/hallucination-mitigation-in-lvlms/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15818/) (2023)
- [MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10592/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10355/) (2023)
- [WizardLM: Empowering large pre-trained language models to follow complex instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12244/) (2023)
- [Gemini: A Family of Highly Capable Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11805/) (2023)
- [The Dawn of LMMs: Preliminary Explorations with GPT-4V(ision)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17421/) (2023)
- [Object Hallucination in Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02156/) (2018)
- [HallusionBench: An Advanced Diagnostic Suite for Entangled Language Hallucination and Visual Illusion in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14566/) (2023)
- [Mitigating Hallucination in Large Multi-Modal Models via Robust Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14565/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00253/) (2024)
- [Simple Open-Vocabulary Object Detection with Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.06230/) (2022)
- [M3IT: A Large-Scale Dataset towards Multi-Modal Multilingual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04387/) (2023)
- [ChatCAD: Interactive Computer-Aided Diagnosis on Medical Image using Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.07257/) (2023)
- [How Easy is It to Fool Your Multimodal LLMs? An Empirical Analysis on Deceptive Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13220/) (2024)
- [Advancing Medical Imaging with Language Models: A Journey from N-grams to ChatGPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04920/) (2023)
- [Hal-Eval: A Universal and Fine-grained Hallucination Evaluation Framework for Large Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15721/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models and Causal Inference in Collaboration: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09606/) (2024)
- [Mitigating Open-Vocabulary Caption Hallucinations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03631/) (2023)
- [LLM-Based Human-Robot Collaboration Framework for Manipulation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14972/) (2023)
- [On the Vulnerability of LLM/VLM-Controlled Robotics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10340/) (2024)
- [The Instinctive Bias: Spurious Images lead to Illusion in MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03757/) (2024)
- [LOC-ZSON: Language-driven Object-Centric Zero-Shot Object Retrieval and Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05363/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Navigating the Risks: A Survey of Security, Privacy, and Ethics Threats in LLM-Based Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.09523/) (2024)
- [A Survey of State of the Art Large Vision Language Models: Alignment, Benchmark, Evaluations and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.02189/) (2025)
- [VideoHallu: Evaluating and Mitigating Multi-modal Hallucinations on Synthetic Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.01481/) (2025)
- [A Survey on Multimodal Benchmarks: In the Era of Large AI Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18142/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Multimodal Hallucination Evaluation and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19024/) (2025)
- [WALL-E: World Alignment by Rule Learning Improves World Model-based LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07484/) (2024)
- [DataEnvGym: Data Generation Agents in Teacher Environments with Student Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06215/) (2024)
- [HalluAudio: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Hallucination Detection in Large Audio-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.19300/) (2026)
- [TREND: Tri-teaching for Robust Preference-based Reinforcement Learning with Demonstrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.06079/) (2025)
- [Trokens: Semantic-Aware Relational Trajectory Tokens for Few-Shot Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03695/) (2025)
- [WALL-E 2.0: World Alignment by NeuroSymbolic Learning improves World Model-based LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15785/) (2025)
- [MASS: Motion-Aware Spatial-Temporal Grounding for Physics Reasoning and Comprehension in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18373/) (2025)
- [Improving Visual Reasoning with Iterative Evidence Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14117/) (2026)
- [GHOST: Hallucination-Inducing Image Generation for Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25178/) (2025)
- [Can Humans Dream of Electric Sheep? Human-Written Samples for Fine-Grained Vision-and-Language Hallucination Benchmarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.01021/) (2026)
- [FIHA: Autonomous Hallucination Evaluation in Vision-Language Models with Davidson Scene Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13612/) (2024)
- [SPICE: A Synergistic, Precise, Iterative, and Customizable Image Editing Workflow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09697/) (2025)
- [Preemptive Hallucination Reduction: An Input-Level Approach for Multimodal Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24007/) (2025)
- [From Hallucinations to Jailbreaks: Rethinking the Vulnerability of Large Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24232/) (2025)
- [Empowering Multimodal LLMs with External Tools: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10955/) (2025)
- [No Place to Hide: Benchmarking Video Hallucination with Background-Controlled Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.31933/) (2026)
- [Diving into Mitigating Hallucinations from a Vision Perspective for Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.13836/) (2025)
- [Leveraging NTPs for Efficient Hallucination Detection in VLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.20379/) (2025)
- [Can They Dixit? Yes they Can! Dixit as a Playground for Multimodal Language Model Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19892/) (2025)
- [HalluGen: Synthesizing Realistic and Controllable Hallucinations for Evaluating Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.03345/) (2025)
- [What Makes LVLMs Hallucinate Less? Unveiling the Architectural Factors Behind Hallucination Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30911/) (2026)
- [Unified Hallucination Fuzzing for Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.07525/) (2026)
- [CAST: Mitigating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models via Caption-Guided Visual Attention Steering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.04641/) (2026)
- [MLLMs Get It Right, Then Get It Wrong: Tracing and Correcting Late-Layer Textual Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.17953/) (2026)
- [Overview of SHROOM-Visions 2026: A Shared Task on Hallucination Detection in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.25662/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) are prone to hallucinations, where certain contextual cues in an image can trigger the language module to produce overconfident and incorrect reasoning about abnormal or hypothetical objects. While some benchmarks have been developed to investigate LVLM hallucinations, they often rely on hand-crafted corner cases whose failure patterns may not generalize well. Additionally, fine-tuning on these examples could undermine their validity. To address this, we aim to scale up the number of cases through an automated approach, reducing human bias in crafting such corner cases. This motivates the development of AutoHallusion, the first automated benchmark generation approach that employs several key strategies to create a diverse range of hallucination examples. Our generated visual-question pairs pose significant challenges to LVLMs, requiring them to overcome contextual biases and distractions to arrive at correct answers. AutoHallusion enables us to create new benchmarks at the minimum cost and thus overcomes the fragility of hand-crafted benchmarks. It also reveals common failure patterns and reasons, providing key insights to detect, avoid, or control hallucinations. Comprehensive evaluations of top-tier LVLMs, e.g., GPT-4V(ision), Gemini Pro Vision, Claude 3, and LLaVA-1.5, show a 97.7% and 98.7% success rate of hallucination induction on synthetic and real-world datasets of AutoHallusion, paving the way for a long battle against hallucinations. The codebase and data can be accessed at https://github.com/wuxiyang1996/AutoHallusion.