# Hallucination Score: Towards Mitigating Hallucinations in Generative Image Super-Resolution

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14367 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14367/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 81 of its 121 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 81)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [Photo-Realistic Single Image Super-Resolution Using a Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04802/) (2016)
- [ESRGAN: Enhanced Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00219/) (2018)
- [Reproducible scaling laws for contrastive language-image learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07143/) (2022)
- [MUSIQ: Multi-scale Image Quality Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05997/) (2021)
- [Exploring CLIP for Assessing the Look and Feel of Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12396/) (2022)
- [Real-ESRGAN: Training Real-World Blind Super-Resolution with Pure Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.10833/) (2021)
- [Vision Transformers Need Registers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16588/) (2023)
- [Image Quality Assessment: Unifying Structure and Texture Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07728/) (2020)
- [The Perception-Distortion Tradeoff](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06077/) (2017)
- [Q-Align: Teaching LMMs for Visual Scoring via Discrete Text-Defined Levels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17090/) (2023)
- [Exploiting Diffusion Prior for Real-World Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07015/) (2023)
- [UniPC: A Unified Predictor-Corrector Framework for Fast Sampling of Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04867/) (2023)
- [Directly Fine-Tuning Diffusion Models on Differentiable Rewards](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17400/) (2023)

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

- [SR-Prominence: A Crowdsourced Protocol and Dataset Suite for Perceptually-Weighted Super-Resolution Artifact Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14847/) (2026)
- [Prominence-Aware Artifact Detection and Dataset for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16752/) (2025)
- [Local Intrinsic Dimension Unveils Hallucinations in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.05026/) (2026)
- [Revisiting the Perception-Distortion Trade-off with Spatial-Semantic Guided Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14112/) (2026)
- [BurstGP: Enhancing Raw Burst Image Super Resolution with Generative Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.23508/) (2026)
- [Adaptive Densification for High-Fidelity and Efficient Sparse Gaussian Splatting in Arbitrary-Scale Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.29400/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generative super-resolution (GSR) currently sets the state-of-the-art in terms of perceptual image quality, overcoming the "regression-to-the-mean" blur of prior non-generative models. However, from a human perspective, such models do not fully conform to the optimal balance between quality and fidelity. Instead, a different class of artifacts, in which generated details fail to perceptually match the low resolution image (LRI) or ground-truth image (GTI), is a critical but under-studied issue in GSR, limiting its practical deployment. In this work, we focus on measuring, analyzing, and mitigating these artifacts (i.e., "hallucinations"). We observe that hallucinations are not well-characterized with existing image metrics or quality models, as they are orthogonal to both exact fidelity and no-reference quality. Instead, we take advantage of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) by constructing a prompt that assesses hallucinatory visual elements and generates a "Hallucination Score" (HS). We find that HS is closely aligned with human evaluations, and also provides complementary insights to prior image metrics used for super-resolution (SR) models. Finally, we propose a few efficient HS proxies and demonstrate how diffusion-based GSR models can be fine-tuned to mitigate hallucinations, leveraging HS proxies as differentiable reward functions.