# Exploring Causes and Mitigation of Hallucinations in Large Vision Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.16842 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16842/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 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 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Feb 2025.

## 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)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Evaluating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10355/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Hallucination in Large Language Models: Principles, Taxonomy, Challenges, and Open Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05232/) (2023)
- [Are We on the Right Way for Evaluating Large Vision-Language Models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20330/) (2024)
- [Mitigating Object Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models through Visual Contrastive Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16922/) (2023)
- [Object Hallucination in Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02156/) (2018)
- [YOLO-World: Real-Time Open-Vocabulary Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17270/) (2024)
- [OPERA: Alleviating Hallucination in Multi-Modal Large Language Models via Over-Trust Penalty and Retrospection-Allocation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17911/) (2023)
- [Analyzing and Mitigating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00754/) (2023)
- [AMBER: An LLM-free Multi-dimensional Benchmark for MLLMs Hallucination Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07397/) (2023)
- [Detecting and Preventing Hallucinations in Large Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06394/) (2023)
- [Woodpecker: Hallucination Correction for Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16045/) (2023)
- [Beyond Hallucinations: Enhancing LVLMs through Hallucination-Aware Direct Preference Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16839/) (2023)
- [Why are Visually-Grounded Language Models Bad at Image Classification?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18415/) (2024)
- [Multi-Object Hallucination in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06192/) (2024)
- [Investigating and Mitigating the Multimodal Hallucination Snowballing in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00569/) (2024)
- [TagCLIP: A Local-to-Global Framework to Enhance Open-Vocabulary Multi-Label Classification of CLIP Without Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12828/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [SAVAA: Mitigating Hallucinations in LVLMs via Step-wise Adaptive Visual Attention Amplification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.13600/) (2026)
- [Improving Medical Visual Reinforcement Fine-Tuning via Perception and Reasoning Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.10619/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) integrate image encoders with Large Language Models (LLMs) to process multi-modal inputs and perform complex visual tasks. However, they often generate hallucinations by describing non-existent objects or attributes, compromising their reliability. This study analyzes hallucination patterns in image captioning, showing that not all tokens in the generation process are influenced by image input and that image dependency can serve as a useful signal for hallucination detection. To address this, we develop an automated pipeline to identify hallucinated objects and train a token-level classifier using hidden representations from parallel inference passes-with and without image input. Leveraging this classifier, we introduce a decoding strategy that effectively controls hallucination rates in image captioning at inference time.