# Towards Statistical Factuality Guarantee for Large Vision-Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.20560 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20560/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 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 35 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 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, 30 of 35)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Phi-3 Technical Report: A Highly Capable Language Model Locally on Your Phone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14219/) (2024)
- [Evaluating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10355/) (2023)
- [LLaVA-Med: Training a Large Language-and-Vision Assistant for Biomedicine in One Day](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00890/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13549/) (2023)
- [Aligning Large Multimodal Models with Factually Augmented RLHF](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14525/) (2023)
- [CogAgent: A Visual Language Model for GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08914/) (2023)
- [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)
- [MIMIC-CXR-JPG, a large publicly available database of labeled chest radiographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07042/) (2019)
- [HallusionBench: An Advanced Diagnostic Suite for Entangled Language Hallucination and Visual Illusion in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14566/) (2023)
- [BiomedCLIP: a multimodal biomedical foundation model pretrained from fifteen million scientific image-text pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00915/) (2023)
- [LayoutLMv3: Pre-training for Document AI with Unified Text and Image Masking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08387/) (2022)
- [Conformal prediction beyond exchangeability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13415/) (2022)
- [Analyzing and Mitigating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00754/) (2023)
- [ICDAR2019 Competition on Scanned Receipt OCR and Information Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10213/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Multi-Modal Hallucination Control by Visual Information Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14003/) (2024)
- [Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models with Instruction Contrastive Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18715/) (2024)
- [Paying More Attention to Image: A Training-Free Method for Alleviating Hallucination in LVLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21771/) (2024)
- [Conformal Prediction With Conditional Guarantees](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12616/) (2023)
- [MAIRA-2: Grounded Radiology Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04449/) (2024)
- [Language Models with Conformal Factuality Guarantees](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10978/) (2024)
- [Hallucination Augmented Contrastive Learning for Multimodal Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06968/) (2023)
- [Volcano: Mitigating Multimodal Hallucination through Self-Feedback Guided Revision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07362/) (2023)
- [Improving Chest X-Ray Report Generation by Leveraging Warm Starting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09405/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Mitigating Object Hallucinations in LVLMs via Attention Imbalance Rectification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.24058/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Advancements in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated promising performance in a variety of vision-language tasks involving image-conditioned free-form text generation. However, growing concerns about hallucinations in LVLMs, where the generated text is inconsistent with the visual context, are becoming a major impediment to deploying these models in applications that demand guaranteed reliability. In this paper, we introduce a framework to address this challenge, ConfLVLM, which is grounded on conformal prediction to achieve finite-sample distribution-free statistical guarantees on the factuality of LVLM output. This framework treats an LVLM as a hypothesis generator, where each generated text detail (or claim) is considered an individual hypothesis. It then applies a statistical hypothesis testing procedure to verify each claim using efficient heuristic uncertainty measures to filter out unreliable claims before returning any responses to users. We conduct extensive experiments covering three representative application domains, including general scene understanding, medical radiology report generation, and document understanding. Remarkably, ConfLVLM reduces the error rate of claims generated by LLaVa-1.5 for scene descriptions from 87.8% to 10.0% by filtering out erroneous claims with a 95.3% true positive rate. Our results further demonstrate that ConfLVLM is highly flexible, and can be applied to any black-box LVLMs paired with any uncertainty measure for any image-conditioned free-form text generation task while providing a rigorous guarantee on controlling the risk of hallucination.