# MedHallTune: An Instruction-Tuning Benchmark for Mitigating Medical Hallucination in Vision-Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.20780 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20780/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 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 40 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 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 40)

- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03326/) (2024)
- [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)
- [G-Eval: NLG Evaluation using GPT-4 with Better Human Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16634/) (2023)
- [Qwen-VL: A Versatile Vision-Language Model for Understanding, Localization, Text Reading, and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12966/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Hallucination in Large Language Models: Principles, Taxonomy, Challenges, and Open Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05232/) (2023)
- [Expanding Performance Boundaries of Open-Source Multimodal Models with Model, Data, and Test-Time Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05271/) (2024)
- [LLaVA-Med: Training a Large Language-and-Vision Assistant for Biomedicine in One Day](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00890/) (2023)
- [mPLUG-Owl: Modularization Empowers Large Language Models with Multimodality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14178/) (2023)
- [Janus-Pro: Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation with Data and Model Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.17811/) (2025)
- [HallusionBench: An Advanced Diagnostic Suite for Entangled Language Hallucination and Visual Illusion in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14566/) (2023)
- [PathVQA: 30000+ Questions for Medical Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10286/) (2020)
- [SLAKE: A Semantically-Labeled Knowledge-Enhanced Dataset for Medical Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09542/) (2021)
- [Mitigating Hallucination in Large Multi-Modal Models via Robust Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14565/) (2023)
- [Med-Flamingo: a Multimodal Medical Few-shot Learner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15189/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00253/) (2024)
- [HaluEval: A Large-Scale Hallucination Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11747/) (2023)
- [PMC-VQA: Visual Instruction Tuning for Medical Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10415/) (2023)
- [BiomedGPT: A Generalist Vision-Language Foundation Model for Diverse Biomedical Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17100/) (2023)
- [OmniMedVQA: A New Large-Scale Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark for Medical LVLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09181/) (2024)
- [Towards Generalist Foundation Model for Radiology by Leveraging Web-scale 2D&3D Medical Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02463/) (2023)
- [Med-HALT: Medical Domain Hallucination Test for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15343/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Large Language Models in Medicine: Progress, Application, and Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05112/) (2023)
- [HealthGPT: A Medical Large Vision-Language Model for Unifying Comprehension and Generation via Heterogeneous Knowledge Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09838/) (2025)
- [A Vision-Language Foundation Model to Enhance Efficiency of Chest X-ray Interpretation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12208/) (2024)
- [MedTrinity-25M: A Large-scale Multimodal Dataset with Multigranular Annotations for Medicine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02900/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [A Survey of Multimodal Hallucination Evaluation and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19024/) (2025)
- [UniVRSE: Unified Vision-conditioned Response Semantic Entropy for Hallucination Detection in Medical Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20504/) (2025)
- [ClinHallu: A Benchmark for Diagnosing Stage-Wise Hallucinations in Medical MLLM Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.14697/) (2026)
- [Suppressing Prior-Comparison Hallucinations in Radiology Report Generation via Semantically Decoupled Latent Steering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.23676/) (2026)
- [Pseudocode-Guided Structured Reasoning for Automating Reliable Inference in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.19663/) (2026)
- [SHOVIR: A Benchmark for Evaluating Vision Shortcut Learning in Radiology Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.30201/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The increasing use of vision-language models (VLMs) in healthcare applications presents great challenges related to hallucinations, in which the models may generate seemingly plausible results that are in fact incorrect. Such hallucinations can jeopardize clinical decision making, potentially harming the diagnosis and treatments. In this work, we propose MedHallTune, a large-scale benchmark designed specifically to evaluate and mitigate hallucinations in medical VLMs. Comprising over 100,000 images and 1,000,000 instruction pairs, MedHallTune includes both hallucination and non-hallucination samples, each with ground-truth annotations. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of current medical and general VLMs using MedHallTune, assessing their performance across key metrics, including clinical accuracy, relevance, detail level, and risk level. The experimental results show that fine-tuning with MedHallTune successfully improves the ability of several existing models to manage hallucinations and boost their zero-shot performance on downstream visual-question-answering (VQA) tasks, making them more reliable for practical medical applications. Our work contributes to the development of more trustworthy VLMs. Codes and dataset will be available at hrefhttps://github.com/russellyq/MedHallTuneMedHallTune.