# HalDec-Bench: Benchmarking Hallucination Detector in Image Captioning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20515 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20515/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 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 50 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 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, 30 of 50)

- [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)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [MMMU: A Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Expert AGI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16502/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Conceptual 12M: Pushing Web-Scale Image-Text Pre-Training To Recognize Long-Tail Visual Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08981/) (2021)
- [How Far Are We to GPT-4V? Closing the Gap to Commercial Multimodal Models with Open-Source Suites](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16821/) (2024)
- [ShareGPT4V: Improving Large Multi-Modal Models with Better Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12793/) (2023)
- [CogVLM: Visual Expert for Pretrained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03079/) (2023)
- [Mitigating Object Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models through Visual Contrastive Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16922/) (2023)
- [LLM Evaluators Recognize and Favor Their Own Generations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13076/) (2024)
- [Object Hallucination in Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02156/) (2018)
- [MiniGPT-v2: large language model as a unified interface for vision-language multi-task learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09478/) (2023)
- [When and why vision-language models behave like bags-of-words, and what to do about it?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01936/) (2022)
- [LLM-Blender: Ensembling Large Language Models with Pairwise Ranking and Generative Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02561/) (2023)
- [Winoground: Probing Vision and Language Models for Visio-Linguistic Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03162/) (2022)
- [MMMU-Pro: A More Robust Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02813/) (2024)
- [Evaluating Text-to-Visual Generation with Image-to-Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01291/) (2024)
- [Analyzing and Mitigating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00754/) (2023)
- [Detecting and Preventing Hallucinations in Large Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06394/) (2023)
- [SugarCrepe: Fixing Hackable Benchmarks for Vision-Language Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14610/) (2023)
- [Multi-Modal Hallucination Control by Visual Information Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14003/) (2024)
- [Teaching CLIP to Count to Ten](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12066/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Can Humans Dream of Electric Sheep? Human-Written Samples for Fine-Grained Vision-and-Language Hallucination Benchmarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.01021/) (2026)
- [GAVEL: Grounded Caption Error Verification and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.26923/) (2026)
- [VIGIL: Tackling Hallucination Detection in Image Recontextualization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.14633/) (2026)
- [Overview of SHROOM-Visions 2026: A Shared Task on Hallucination Detection in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.25662/) (2026)
- [VidOmni-Bench: A Benchmark for Fine-Grained Video Understanding via Spatio-Temporal Event Verification across Complexity and Duration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.21521/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Hallucination detection in captions (HalDec) assesses a vision-language model's ability to correctly align image content with text by identifying errors in captions that misrepresent the image. Beyond evaluation, effective hallucination detection is also essential for curating high-quality image-caption pairs used to train VLMs. However, the generalizability of VLMs as hallucination detectors across different captioning models and hallucination types remains unclear due to the lack of a comprehensive benchmark. In this work, we introduce HalDec-Bench, a benchmark designed to evaluate hallucination detectors in a principled and interpretable manner. HalDec-Bench contains captions generated by diverse VLMs together with human annotations indicating the presence of hallucinations, detailed hallucination-type categories, and segment-level labels. The benchmark provides tasks with a wide range of difficulty levels and reveals performance differences across models that are not visible in existing multimodal reasoning or alignment benchmarks. Our analysis further uncovers two key findings. First, detectors tend to recognize sentences appearing at the beginning of a response as correct, regardless of their actual correctness. Second, our experiments suggest that dataset noise can be substantially reduced by using strong VLMs as filters while employing recent VLMs as caption generators. Our project page is available at https://dahlian00.github.io/HalDec-Bench-Page/.