# Reallocating Attention Across Layers to Reduce Multimodal Hallucination

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10285 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10285/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 58 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Oct 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Multimodal reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/multimodal-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 58)

- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17651/) (2023)
- [Qwen2 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10671/) (2024)
- [Survey of Hallucination in Natural Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03629/) (2022)
- [Evaluating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10355/) (2023)
- [MathVista: Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning of Foundation Models in Visual Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02255/) (2023)
- [Kosmos-2: Grounding Multimodal Large Language Models to the World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14824/) (2023)
- [In-context Learning and Induction Heads](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.11895/) (2022)
- [Are We on the Right Way for Evaluating Large Vision-Language Models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20330/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13549/) (2023)
- [Shikra: Unleashing Multimodal LLM's Referential Dialogue Magic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15195/) (2023)
- [Are Sixteen Heads Really Better than One?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10650/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Object Hallucination in Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02156/) (2018)
- [HallusionBench: An Advanced Diagnostic Suite for Entangled Language Hallucination and Visual Illusion in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14566/) (2023)
- [Language Is Not All You Need: Aligning Perception with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14045/) (2023)
- [Measuring Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning with MATH-Vision Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14804/) (2024)
- [OPERA: Alleviating Hallucination in Multi-Modal Large Language Models via Over-Trust Penalty and Retrospection-Allocation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17911/) (2023)
- [LLaVA-CoT: Let Vision Language Models Reason Step-by-Step](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10440/) (2024)
- [Mitigating Hallucination in Large Multi-Modal Models via Robust Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14565/) (2023)
- [Hallucination of Multimodal Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18930/) (2024)
- [Kimi-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07491/) (2025)
- [DoLa: Decoding by Contrasting Layers Improves Factuality in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03883/) (2023)
- [R1-Onevision: Advancing Generalized Multimodal Reasoning through Cross-Modal Formalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10615/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Hallucination in Large Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05922/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00253/) (2024)
- [Visual CoT: Advancing Multi-Modal Language Models with a Comprehensive Dataset and Benchmark for Chain-of-Thought Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16999/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [SEER: A Self-Grounded Evidence Interface for Controlled Spatial Relation Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.03631/) (2026)
- [Witness Evidence Portfolios: Single-Prefill Risk Detection for Closed Multimodal Answers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.27667/) (2026)
- [Look Before You Judge: Training-Free Region Mining for Grounded and Explainable Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.35536/) (2026)
- [VAttnPO: Visual Attention-Guided Policy Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.16735/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multimodal large reasoning models (MLRMs) often suffer from hallucinations that stem not only from insufficient visual grounding but also from imbalanced allocation between perception and reasoning processes. Building upon recent interpretability findings suggesting a staged division of attention across layers, we analyze how this functional misalignment leads to two complementary failure modes: perceptual bias in shallow layers and reasoning drift in deeper layers. To alleviate these issues, we propose Functional Head Identification and Class-Conditioned Rescaling , a lightweight, training-free plugin that identifies perception- and reasoning-oriented heads and adaptively rebalances their layerwise contributions. Our method improves reasoning consistency and visual faithfulness without retraining or any architectural modification. Evaluations across three representative MLRMs and five multimodal reasoning benchmarks show an average 4.2% point gain, with less than 1% additional computation and only 9% baseline latency. Beyond empirical improvements, our study provides an interpretable perspective on regulating cross-layer functional dynamics to enhance the reliability of multimodal reasoning.