# ClearSight: Visual Signal Enhancement for Object Hallucination Mitigation in Multimodal Large language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.13107 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13107/

## Key facts

- Cited by 40 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 45 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Mar 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 45)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (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)
- [Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00837/) (2016)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (2021)
- [Learn to Explain: Multimodal Reasoning via Thought Chains for Science Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09513/) (2022)
- [Evaluating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10355/) (2023)
- [MME: A Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13394/) (2023)
- [LLaVA-Med: Training a Large Language-and-Vision Assistant for Biomedicine in One Day](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00890/) (2023)
- [How Far Are We to GPT-4V? Closing the Gap to Commercial Multimodal Models with Open-Source Suites](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16821/) (2024)
- [mPLUG-Owl: Modularization Empowers Large Language Models with Multimodality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14178/) (2023)
- [Shikra: Unleashing Multimodal LLM's Referential Dialogue Magic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15195/) (2023)
- [A-OKVQA: A Benchmark for Visual Question Answering using World Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01718/) (2022)
- [Mitigating Object Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models through Visual Contrastive Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16922/) (2023)
- [Contrastive Decoding: Open-ended Text Generation as Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15097/) (2022)
- [OPERA: Alleviating Hallucination in Multi-Modal Large Language Models via Over-Trust Penalty and Retrospection-Allocation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17911/) (2023)
- [Mitigating Hallucination in Large Multi-Modal Models via Robust Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14565/) (2023)
- [nocaps: novel object captioning at scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08658/) (2018)
- [GPT4RoI: Instruction Tuning Large Language Model on Region-of-Interest](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03601/) (2023)
- [MIMIC-IT: Multi-Modal In-Context Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05425/) (2023)
- [Counterfactual VQA: A Cause-Effect Look at Language Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04315/) (2020)
- [Detecting and Preventing Hallucinations in Large Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06394/) (2023)
- [Driving with LLMs: Fusing Object-Level Vector Modality for Explainable Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01957/) (2023)
- [Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models with Instruction Contrastive Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18715/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [More Thinking, Less Seeing? Assessing Amplified Hallucination in Multimodal Reasoning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21523/) (2025)
- [VisMem: Latent Vision Memory Unlocks Potential of Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.11007/) (2025)
- [Visual Multi-Agent System: Mitigating Hallucination Snowballing via Visual Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21789/) (2025)
- [Are VLMs Seeing or Just Saying? Uncovering the Illusion of Visual Re-examination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15864/) (2026)
- [Thinking in Uncertainty: Mitigating Hallucinations in MLRMs with Latent Entropy-Aware Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.13366/) (2026)
- [Tell Model Where to Look: Mitigating Hallucinations in MLLMs by Vision-Guided Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20032/) (2025)
- [Look Carefully: Adaptive Visual Reinforcements in Multimodal Large Language Models for Hallucination Mitigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.24041/) (2026)
- [Capturing Gaze Shifts for Guidance: Cross-Modal Fusion Enhancement for VLM Hallucination Mitigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.22067/) (2025)
- [CRoPS: A Training-Free Hallucination Mitigation Framework for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.00659/) (2026)
- [Same Attention, Different Truths: Put Logit-Lens over Visual Attention to Detect and Mitigate LVLM Object Hallucination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.07302/) (2026)
- [SketchMind: A Multi-Agent Cognitive Framework for Assessing Student-Drawn Scientific Sketches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.22904/) (2025)
- [V-ITI: Mitigating Hallucinations in Multimodal Large Language Models via Visual Inference-Time Intervention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.03542/) (2025)
- [Towards Interpretable Hallucination Analysis and Mitigation in LVLMs via Contrastive Neuron Steering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00621/) (2026)
- [Decoding by Perturbation: Mitigating MLLM Hallucinations via Dynamic Textual Perturbation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12424/) (2026)
- [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)
- [GeoPE:A Unified Geometric Positional Embedding for Structured Tensors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04963/) (2025)
- [Unleashing the Intrinsic Visual Representation Capability of Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.06281/) (2025)
- [SAVAA: Mitigating Hallucinations in LVLMs via Step-wise Adaptive Visual Attention Amplification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.13600/) (2026)
- [EAGLE: Expert-Augmented Attention Guidance for Tuning-Free Industrial Anomaly Detection in Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.17419/) (2026)
- [HulluEdit: Single-Pass Evidence-Consistent Subspace Editing for Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.22727/) (2026)
- [One Token, Two Fates: A Unified Framework via Vision Token Manipulation Against MLLMs Hallucination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.10360/) (2026)
- [SAGE: Sink-Aware Grounded Decoding for Multimodal Hallucination Mitigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27898/) (2026)
- [Beyond Static Cropping: Layer-Adaptive Visual Localization and Decoding Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.04304/) (2026)
- [Breaking the Illusion: When Positive Meets Negative in Multimodal Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.06679/) (2026)
- [Aligning Large Vision-Language Models at Test Time: A Trajectory-Guided Structured Sampling Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.03204/) (2026)
- [VERHallu: Evaluating and Mitigating Event Relation Hallucination in Video Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.10010/) (2026)
- [Attention to details, logits to truth: visual-aware attention and logits enhancement to mitigate hallucinations in LVLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.09521/) (2026)
- [Schr"oMind: Mitigating Hallucinations in Multimodal Large Language Models via Solving the Schr"odinger Bridge Problem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.09528/) (2026)
- [Scalpel: Fine-Grained Alignment of Attention Activation Manifolds via Mixture Gaussian Bridges to Mitigate Multimodal Hallucination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.09541/) (2026)
- [Visual Attention Drifts,but Anchors Hold:Mitigating Hallucination in Multimodal Large Language Models via Cross-Layer Visual Anchors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25088/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Contrastive decoding strategies are widely used to mitigate object hallucinations in multimodal large language models (MLLMs). By reducing over-reliance on language priors, these strategies ensure that generated content remains closely grounded in visual inputs, producing contextually accurate outputs. Since contrastive decoding requires no additional training or external tools, it offers both computational efficiency and versatility, making it highly attractive. However, these methods present two main limitations: (1) bluntly suppressing language priors can compromise coherence and accuracy of generated content, and (2) processing contrastive inputs adds computational load, significantly slowing inference speed. To address these challenges, we propose Visual Amplification Fusion (VAF), a plug-and-play technique that enhances attention to visual signals within the model's middle layers, where modality fusion predominantly occurs. This approach enables more effective capture of visual features, reducing the model's bias toward language modality. Experimental results demonstrate that VAF significantly reduces hallucinations across various MLLMs without affecting inference speed, while maintaining coherence and accuracy in generated outputs.