# Generate, but Verify: Reducing Hallucination in Vision-Language Models with Retrospective Resampling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.13169 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13169/

## Key facts

- Cited by 33 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 43 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Apr 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 43)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18290/) (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)
- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [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)
- [ShareGPT4V: Improving Large Multi-Modal Models with Better Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12793/) (2023)
- [Cambrian-1: A Fully Open, Vision-Centric Exploration of Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16860/) (2024)
- [LISA: Reasoning Segmentation via Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00692/) (2023)
- [Aligning Large Multimodal Models with Factually Augmented RLHF](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14525/) (2023)
- [Mitigating Object Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models through Visual Contrastive Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16922/) (2023)
- [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)
- [RLHF-V: Towards Trustworthy MLLMs via Behavior Alignment from Fine-grained Correctional Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00849/) (2023)
- [Hallucination of Multimodal Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18930/) (2024)
- [DoLa: Decoding by Contrasting Layers Improves Factuality in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03883/) (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)
- [Women also Snowboard: Overcoming Bias in Captioning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09797/) (2018)
- [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)
- [REVISE: A Tool for Measuring and Mitigating Bias in Visual Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07999/) (2020)
- [Hallucination Augmented Contrastive Learning for Multimodal Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06968/) (2023)
- [Reliable Visual Question Answering: Abstain Rather Than Answer Incorrectly](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13631/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [OmniDPO: A Preference Optimization Framework to Address Omni-Modal Hallucination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.00723/) (2025)
- [Hallucination Begins Where Saliency Drops](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20279/) (2026)
- [Vision-Language Introspection: Mitigating Overconfident Hallucinations in MLLMs via Interpretable Bi-Causal Steering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.05159/) (2026)
- [Mitigating Hallucinations in Multimodal LLMs via Object-aware Preference Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.20181/) (2025)
- [MoD-DPO: Towards Mitigating Cross-modal Hallucinations in Omni LLMs using Modality Decoupled Preference Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.03192/) (2026)
- [Don't Let the Video Speak: Audio-Contrastive Preference Optimization for Audio-Visual Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.14129/) (2026)
- [Capturing Gaze Shifts for Guidance: Cross-Modal Fusion Enhancement for VLM Hallucination Mitigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.22067/) (2025)
- [InEx: Hallucination Mitigation via Introspection and Cross-Modal Multi-Agent Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02981/) (2025)
- [Large Vision-Language Models Get Lost in Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.05668/) (2026)
- [Training-free Uncertainty Guidance for Complex Visual Tasks with MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.00705/) (2025)
- [Grounding the Score: Explicit Visual Premise Verification for Reliable Vision-Language Process Reward Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16253/) (2026)
- [FINER: MLLMs Hallucinate under Fine-grained Negative Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17662/) (2026)
- ["It's trained by non-disabled people": Evaluating How Image Quality Affects Product Captioning with Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.08917/) (2025)
- [Decoding by Perturbation: Mitigating MLLM Hallucinations via Dynamic Textual Perturbation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12424/) (2026)
- [VisTIRA: Closing the Image-Text Modality Gap in Visual Math Reasoning via Structured Tool Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.14440/) (2026)
- [SAVAA: Mitigating Hallucinations in LVLMs via Step-wise Adaptive Visual Attention Amplification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.13600/) (2026)
- [Verification Mirage: Mapping the Reliability Boundary of Self-Verification in Medical VQA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.10850/) (2026)
- [No Place to Hide: Benchmarking Video Hallucination with Background-Controlled Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.31933/) (2026)
- [Pathological Truth Bias in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22674/) (2025)
- [ChainMPQ: Interleaved Text-Image Reasoning Chains for Mitigating Relation Hallucinations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06292/) (2025)
- [CLUTCH: Contextualized Language model for Unlocking Text-Conditioned Hand motion modelling in the wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.17770/) (2026)
- [ESC: Emotional Self-Correction for Reliable Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02089/) (2026)
- [Hallucinations Leave a Grounding Signature:Verifier-Guided Decoding for Selective Object Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.27823/) (2026)
- [RetroThinker: Enabling Retrospective Thinking in Speech LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.11864/) (2026)
- [EraseLoRA: MLLM-Driven Foreground Exclusion and Background Subtype Aggregation for Dataset-Free Object Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.21545/) (2025)
- [Revealing Multi-View Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.23934/) (2026)
- [Scientific Knowledge-driven Decoding Constraints Improving the Reliability of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.06603/) (2026)
- [Rethinking Visual Neglect: Steering via Context-Preference for MLLM Hallucination Mitigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.27993/) (2026)
- [FineGen: A VLM-based Multi-Agent Framework for Fine-Grained Image-Text Dataset Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.07645/) (2026)
- [CFCamo: A Counterfactual Detect-or-Abstain Framework for Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.11231/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel at visual understanding but often suffer from visual hallucinations, where they generate descriptions of nonexistent objects, actions, or concepts, posing significant risks in safety-critical applications. Existing hallucination mitigation methods typically follow one of two paradigms: generation adjustment, which modifies decoding behavior to align text with visual inputs, and post-hoc verification, where external models assess and correct outputs. While effective, generation adjustment methods often rely on heuristics and lack correction mechanisms, while post-hoc verification is complicated, typically requiring multiple models and tending to reject outputs rather than refine them. In this work, we introduce REVERSE, a unified framework that integrates hallucination-aware training with on-the-fly self-verification. By leveraging a new hallucination-verification dataset containing over 1.3M semi-synthetic samples, along with a novel inference-time retrospective resampling technique, our approach enables VLMs to both detect hallucinations during generation and dynamically revise those hallucinations. Our evaluations show that REVERSE achieves state-of-the-art hallucination reduction, outperforming the best existing methods by up to 12% on CHAIR-MSCOCO and 34% on HaloQuest. Our dataset, model, and code are available at: https://reverse-vlm.github.io.