# VOPE: Revisiting Hallucination of Vision-Language Models in Voluntary Imagination Task

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.13420 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.13420/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Hallucination mitigation in LVLMs, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 14 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Nov 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, 14 of 14)

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- [MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10592/) (2023)
- [Qwen-VL: A Versatile Vision-Language Model for Understanding, Localization, Text Reading, and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12966/) (2023)
- [InternVL3.5: Advancing Open-Source Multimodal Models in Versatility, Reasoning, and Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18265/) (2025)
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- [Gemini: A Family of Highly Capable Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11805/) (2023)
- [Aligning Large Multimodal Models with Factually Augmented RLHF](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14525/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00253/) (2024)
- [AMBER: An LLM-free Multi-dimensional Benchmark for MLLMs Hallucination Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07397/) (2023)
- [CIEM: Contrastive Instruction Evaluation Method for Better Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.02301/) (2023)
- [A Character-Centric Creative Story Generation via Imagination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16667/) (2024)
- [REVAL: A Comprehension Evaluation on Reliability and Values of Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16566/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Most research on hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) focuses on factual description tasks that prohibit any output absent from the image. However, little attention has been paid to hallucinations in voluntary imagination tasks, such as story writing, despite this human-like cognitive ability being essential for real-world generative applications. To address this limitation, we introduce Voluntary-imagined Object Presence Evaluation (VOPE) -- a recheck-based evaluation benchmark for assessing LVLMs' grounding behavior in voluntary imagination tasks. Specifically, VOPE poses recheck-based questions to evaluate how an LVLM interprets the presence of the imagined objects in its own response. Rather than penalizing the imagined content itself, VOPE identifies hallucinations based on the correctness of the model's presence judgments for the generated objects. Built on this idea, we construct a dataset covering captioning, reasoning, and writing tasks with different levels of voluntary imagination. We apply VOPE to several mainstream LVLMs and hallucination mitigation methods, revealing two key findings: (1) most LVLMs hallucinate heavily during voluntary imagination, and their performance in presence evaluation is notably poor on imagined objects; (2) existing hallucination mitigation methods show limited effect in voluntary imagination tasks, making this an important direction for future research.