# Optimizing LVLMs with On-Policy Data for Effective Hallucination Mitigation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.00706 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00706/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 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 49 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 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 49)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18290/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [Neural Ordinary Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.07366/) (2018)
- [Training a Helpful and Harmless Assistant with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05862/) (2022)
- [Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05530/) (2024)
- [Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15343/) (2023)
- [InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14238/) (2023)
- [MMBench: Is Your Multi-modal Model an All-around Player?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06281/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Hallucination in Large Language Models: Principles, Taxonomy, Challenges, and Open Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05232/) (2023)
- [Generalized Cross Entropy Loss for Training Deep Neural Networks with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07836/) (2018)
- [Advantage-Weighted Regression: Simple and Scalable Off-Policy Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.00177/) (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)
- [RLHF-V: Towards Trustworthy MLLMs via Behavior Alignment from Fine-grained Correctional Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00849/) (2023)
- [Iterative Preference Learning from Human Feedback: Bridging Theory and Practice for RLHF under KL-Constraint](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11456/) (2023)
- [AMBER: An LLM-free Multi-dimensional Benchmark for MLLMs Hallucination Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07397/) (2023)
- [Is DPO Superior to PPO for LLM Alignment? A Comprehensive Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10719/) (2024)
- [Direct Language Model Alignment from Online AI Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04792/) (2024)
- [Beyond Hallucinations: Enhancing LVLMs through Hallucination-Aware Direct Preference Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16839/) (2023)
- [Multi-Modal Hallucination Control by Visual Information Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14003/) (2024)
- [Aligning Modalities in Vision Large Language Models via Preference Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11411/) (2024)
- [Preference Fine-Tuning of LLMs Should Leverage Suboptimal, On-Policy Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14367/) (2024)

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

- [Aletheia: What Makes RLVR For Code Verifiers Tick?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12186/) (2026)
- [Visual Preference Optimization with Rubric Rewards](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.13029/) (2026)
- [Perturb the Thought, Not the Pixels: Latent-Space Rollout Diversification for Reinforcement Learning of Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.21595/) (2026)
- [Hallucination Mitigation for Large Vision-Language Models via Implicit Feature Stabilization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.29924/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recently, large vision-language models (LVLMs) have risen to be a promising approach for multimodal tasks. However, principled hallucination mitigation remains a critical challenge.In this work, we first analyze the data generation process in LVLM hallucination mitigation and affirm that on-policy data significantly outperforms off-policy data, which thus calls for efficient and reliable preference annotation of on-policy data. We then point out that, existing annotation methods introduce additional hallucination in training samples, which may enhance the model's hallucination patterns, to address this problem, we propose training a hallucination classifier giving binary annotations, which guarantee clean chosen samples for the subsequent alignment. To further harness of the power of on-policy data, we design a robust iterative direct preference optimization (DPO) algorithm adopting a dynamic sample reweighting scheme. We conduct comprehensive experiments on three benchmarks with comparison to 8 state-of-the-art baselines. In particular, our approach reduces the hallucination rate of LLaVA-1.5-7B on MMHalBench by 50.8% and the average hallucination rate on Object HalBench by 79.5%; more significantly, our method fully taps into the potential of open-source models, enabling LLaVA-1.5-13B to even surpass the performance of GPT-4V.