# Seeing Clearly by Layer Two: Enhancing Attention Heads to Alleviate Hallucination in LVLMs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.09968 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.09968/

## Key facts

- Cited by 52 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 37 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Nov 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, 30 of 37)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Mistral 7B](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06825/) (2023)
- [TruthfulQA: Measuring How Models Mimic Human Falsehoods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07958/) (2021)
- [InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06500/) (2023)
- [MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10592/) (2023)
- [InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14238/) (2023)
- [Qwen-VL: A Versatile Vision-Language Model for Understanding, Localization, Text Reading, and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12966/) (2023)
- [Efficient Streaming Language Models with Attention Sinks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17453/) (2023)
- [Qwen2 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10671/) (2024)
- [Evaluating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10355/) (2023)
- [Video-LLaMA: An Instruction-tuned Audio-Visual Language Model for Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02858/) (2023)
- [Inference-Time Intervention: Eliciting Truthful Answers from a Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03341/) (2023)
- [MM-Vet: Evaluating Large Multimodal Models for Integrated Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02490/) (2023)
- [SEED-Bench: Benchmarking Multimodal LLMs with Generative Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16125/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13549/) (2023)
- [Shikra: Unleashing Multimodal LLM's Referential Dialogue Magic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15195/) (2023)
- [Gemini: A Family of Highly Capable Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11805/) (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)
- [BLINK: Multimodal Large Language Models Can See but Not Perceive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12390/) (2024)
- [LLaMA-VID: An Image is Worth 2 Tokens in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17043/) (2023)
- [Mitigating Hallucination in Large Multi-Modal Models via Robust Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14565/) (2023)
- [DoLa: Decoding by Contrasting Layers Improves Factuality in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03883/) (2023)
- [Mini-Gemini: Mining the Potential of Multi-modality Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18814/) (2024)
- [MultiModal-GPT: A Vision and Language Model for Dialogue with Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04790/) (2023)
- [Label Words are Anchors: An Information Flow Perspective for Understanding In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14160/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 52)

- [Kwai Keye-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01949/) (2025)
- [Visual Attention Never Fades: Selective Progressive Attention ReCalibration for Detailed Image Captioning in Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01419/) (2025)
- [Cracking the Code of Hallucination in LVLMs with Vision-aware Head Divergence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13949/) (2024)
- [DenseWorld-1M: Towards Detailed Dense Grounded Caption in the Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.24102/) (2025)
- [Underwater Image Restoration via Polymorphic Large Kernel CNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18459/) (2024)
- [Mitigating Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models via Adaptive Attention Calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21472/) (2025)
- [Attention Sinks Are Provably Necessary in Softmax Transformers: Evidence from Trigger-Conditional Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.11487/) (2026)
- [Attention Sink in Transformers: A Survey on Utilization, Interpretation, and Mitigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10098/) (2026)
- [Dense360: Dense Understanding from Omnidirectional Panoramas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14471/) (2025)
- [Hallucination Begins Where Saliency Drops](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20279/) (2026)
- [Focusing by Contrastive Attention: Enhancing VLMs' Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06461/) (2025)
- [TARAC: Mitigating Hallucination in LVLMs via Temporal Attention Real-time Accumulative Connection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04099/) (2025)
- [Revealing Perception and Generation Dynamics in LVLMs: Mitigating Hallucinations via Validated Dominance Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.18813/) (2025)
- [Attention with Dependency Parsing Augmentation for Fine-Grained Attribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11404/) (2024)
- [AdaToken-3D: Dynamic Spatial Gating for Efficient 3D Large Multimodal-Models Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12782/) (2025)
- [Making Every Step Effective: Jailbreaking Large Vision-Language Models Through Hierarchical KV Equalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11750/) (2025)
- [A Comprehensive Analysis for Visual Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.01958/) (2025)
- [Reallocating Attention Across Layers to Reduce Multimodal Hallucination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10285/) (2025)
- [Revealing and Enhancing Core Visual Regions: Harnessing Internal Attention Dynamics for Hallucination Mitigation in LVLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15556/) (2026)
- [METEOR: Multi-Encoder Collaborative Token Pruning for Efficient Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20842/) (2025)
- [MAC-Lookup: Multi-Axis Conditional Lookup Model for Underwater Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02270/) (2025)
- [Empowering Multimodal LLMs with External Tools: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10955/) (2025)
- [Cross-Layer Vision Smoothing: Enhancing Visual Understanding via Sustained Focus on Key Objects in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12897/) (2025)
- [C^2ROPE: Causal Continuous Rotary Positional Encoding for 3D Large Multimodal-Models Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.10551/) (2026)
- [AdaIAT: Adaptively Increasing Attention to Generated Text to Alleviate Hallucinations in LVLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.04908/) (2026)
- [SAGE: Sink-Aware Grounded Decoding for Multimodal Hallucination Mitigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27898/) (2026)
- [Addressing Exacerbated Attention Sink for Source-Free Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.25799/) (2026)
- [Enhancing Multimodal Large Language Models Complex Reason via Similarity Computation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09817/) (2024)
- [Context-Aware Decoding for Faithful Vision-Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.05939/) (2026)
- [Look Twice: Training-Free Evidence Highlighting for Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01280/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The hallucination problem in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) remains a common issue. Although image tokens occupy a majority of the input sequence of MLLMs, there is limited research to explore the relationship between image tokens and hallucinations. In this paper, we analyze the distribution of attention scores for image tokens across each layer and head of the model, revealing an intriguing and common phenomenon: most hallucinations are closely linked to the pattern of attention sinks in the self-attention matrix of image tokens, where shallow layers exhibit dense attention sinks and deeper layers show sparse attention sinks. We further analyze the attention heads of different layers and find that heads with high-density attention sink in the image part play a positive role in alleviating hallucinations. In this paper, we propose a training-free method named textcolorredEnhancing textcolorredAttention textcolorredHeads (EAH), an approach designed to enhance the convergence of image tokens attention sinks in the shallow layers. EAH identifies the attention head that shows the vision sink in a shallow layer and extracts its attention matrix. This attention map is then broadcast to other heads in the layer, thereby strengthening the layer to pay more attention to the image itself. With extensive experiments, EAH shows significant hallucination-mitigating performance on different MLLMs and metrics, proving its effectiveness and generality.