# Grounding Language with Vision: A Conditional Mutual Information Calibrated Decoding Strategy for Reducing Hallucinations in LVLMs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.19678 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19678/

## Key facts

- Cited by 17 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 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 May 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)

- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07332/) (2016)
- [MMBench: Is Your Multi-modal Model an All-around Player?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06281/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10355/) (2023)
- [mPLUG-Owl: Modularization Empowers Large Language Models with Multimodality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14178/) (2023)
- [ShareGPT4V: Improving Large Multi-Modal Models with Better Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12793/) (2023)
- [Shikra: Unleashing Multimodal LLM's Referential Dialogue Magic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15195/) (2023)
- [DynamicViT: Efficient Vision Transformers with Dynamic Token Sparsification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02034/) (2021)
- [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)
- [An Image is Worth 1/2 Tokens After Layer 2: Plug-and-Play Inference Acceleration for Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06764/) (2024)
- [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)
- [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)
- [A Survey on Multimodal Large Language Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12320/) (2023)
- [MIMIC-IT: Multi-Modal In-Context Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05425/) (2023)
- [DriveMLM: Aligning Multi-Modal Large Language Models with Behavioral Planning States for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09245/) (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)

## Built on by (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [HLFormer: Enhancing Partially Relevant Video Retrieval with Hyperbolic Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.17402/) (2025)
- [Hallucination Begins Where Saliency Drops](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20279/) (2026)
- [Seeing Through the Chain: Mitigate Hallucination in Multimodal Reasoning Models via CoT Compression and Contrastive Preference Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03380/) (2026)
- [Improving Visual Reasoning with Iterative Evidence Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14117/) (2026)
- [Decoding by Perturbation: Mitigating MLLM Hallucinations via Dynamic Textual Perturbation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12424/) (2026)
- [Heterogeneous Uncertainty-Guided Composed Image Retrieval with Fine-Grained Probabilistic Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.11393/) (2026)
- [SAVAA: Mitigating Hallucinations in LVLMs via Step-wise Adaptive Visual Attention Amplification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.13600/) (2026)
- [AdaIAT: Adaptively Increasing Attention to Generated Text to Alleviate Hallucinations in LVLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.04908/) (2026)
- [Looking Back and Forth: Cross-Image Attention Calibration and Attentive Preference Learning for Multi-Image Hallucination Mitigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.07048/) (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)
- [SAKED: Mitigating Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models via Stability-Aware Knowledge Enhanced Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.09825/) (2026)
- [Steer Where It Matters: Token-Level Visual-Sensitivity Steering for LVLMs Hallucination Mitigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.07647/) (2026)
- [MIRL: Mutual Information-Guided Reinforcement Learning for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.01520/) (2026)
- [MergeHEIR: Mitigating Multimodal Hallucinations as the Tax of Model Merging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.32422/) (2026)
- [DARE to Mitigate Hallucination: Dual-path Auto-Regressive-aware Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36440/) (2026)
- [Relevant Evidence Decoding for Audio-Visual Hallucination Mitigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.02976/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) are susceptible to hallucinations, where generated responses seem semantically plausible yet exhibit little or no relevance to the input image. Previous studies reveal that this issue primarily stems from LVLMs' over-reliance on language priors while disregarding the visual information during decoding. To alleviate this issue, we introduce a novel Conditional Pointwise Mutual Information (C-PMI) calibrated decoding strategy, which adaptively strengthens the mutual dependency between generated texts and input images to mitigate hallucinations. Unlike existing methods solely focusing on text token sampling, we propose to jointly model the contributions of visual and textual tokens to C-PMI, formulating hallucination mitigation as a bi-level optimization problem aimed at maximizing mutual information. To solve it, we design a token purification mechanism that dynamically regulates the decoding process by sampling text tokens remaining maximally relevant to the given image, while simultaneously refining image tokens most pertinent to the generated response. Extensive experiments across various benchmarks reveal that the proposed method significantly reduces hallucinations in LVLMs while preserving decoding efficiency.