# Energy-Guided Decoding for Object Hallucination Mitigation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07731 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07731/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 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 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Jul 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)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06500/) (2023)
- [Locating and Editing Factual Associations in GPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05262/) (2022)
- [PaLM-E: An Embodied Multimodal Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03378/) (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)
- [Transformer Feed-Forward Layers Are Key-Value Memories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.14913/) (2020)
- [Man is to Computer Programmer as Woman is to Homemaker? Debiasing Word Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06520/) (2016)
- [Energy-based Out-of-distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03759/) (2020)
- [LLaMA-Adapter: Efficient Fine-tuning of Language Models with Zero-init Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16199/) (2023)
- [Eyes Wide Shut? Exploring the Visual Shortcomings of Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06209/) (2024)
- [DeepSeek-VL: Towards Real-World Vision-Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05525/) (2024)
- [Towards Automated Circuit Discovery for Mechanistic Interpretability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14997/) (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)
- [Object Hallucination in Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02156/) (2018)
- [Eliciting Latent Predictions from Transformers with the Tuned Lens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08112/) (2023)
- [Contrastive Decoding: Open-ended Text Generation as Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15097/) (2022)
- [OpenFlamingo: An Open-Source Framework for Training Large Autoregressive Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01390/) (2023)
- [mPLUG-Owl2: Revolutionizing Multi-modal Large Language Model with Modality Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04257/) (2023)
- [Transformer Feed-Forward Layers Build Predictions by Promoting Concepts in the Vocabulary Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14680/) (2022)
- [OPERA: Alleviating Hallucination in Multi-Modal Large Language Models via Over-Trust Penalty and Retrospection-Allocation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17911/) (2023)
- [Your Classifier is Secretly an Energy Based Model and You Should Treat it Like One](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03263/) (2019)
- [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)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Look on Demand: A Cognitive Scheduling Framework for Visual Evidence Acquisition in Multimodal Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28160/) (2026)
- [Semantic-Spatial Agreement Verification for Mitigating Object Hallucination in Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.17269/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Mitigating object hallucination in large vision-language models (LVLMs) is critical to their safe deployment. Existing methods either are restricted to specific decoding methods, or demand sophisticated modifications to visual inputs, or rely on knowledge from external models. In this work, we first reveal the phenomenon that VLMs exhibit significant imbalance in the ``Yes'' ratio ( ie, the fraction of ``Yes'' answers among the total number of questions) across three different visual question answering (VQA) datasets. Furthermore, we propose an energy-based decoding method, which dynamically selects the hidden states from the layer with minimal energy score. It is simple yet effective in reducing the bias for the yes ratio while boosting performance across three benchmarks (POPE, MME, and MMVP). Our method consistently improves accuracy and F1 score on three VQA datasets across three commonly used VLMs over several baseline methods. The average accuracy improvement is 4.82% compared to greedy decoding. Moreover, the average yes-ratio gap reduction is 8.81%, meaning the proposed method is less biased as shown in Figure 1.