# Watch Closely: Mitigating Object Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models with Disentangled Decoding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.19070 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.19070/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 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 20 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Dec 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, 20 of 20)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06500/) (2023)
- [Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07332/) (2016)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [A-OKVQA: A Benchmark for Visual Question Answering using World Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01718/) (2022)
- [Mitigating Object Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models through Visual Contrastive Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16922/) (2023)
- [Contrastive Decoding: Open-ended Text Generation as Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15097/) (2022)
- [OPERA: Alleviating Hallucination in Multi-Modal Large Language Models via Over-Trust Penalty and Retrospection-Allocation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17911/) (2023)
- [Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models with Instruction Contrastive Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18715/) (2024)
- [Paying More Attention to Image: A Training-Free Method for Alleviating Hallucination in LVLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21771/) (2024)
- [HALC: Object Hallucination Reduction via Adaptive Focal-Contrast Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00425/) (2024)
- [HalluciDoctor: Mitigating Hallucinatory Toxicity in Visual Instruction Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13614/) (2023)
- [Self-Introspective Decoding: Alleviating Hallucinations for Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02032/) (2024)
- [GQA: A New Dataset for Real-World Visual Reasoning and Compositional Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09506/) (2019)
- [PerturboLLaVA: Reducing Multimodal Hallucinations with Perturbative Visual Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06486/) (2025)
- [CATCH: Complementary Adaptive Token-level Contrastive Decoding to Mitigate Hallucinations in LVLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.12713/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Adversarial Orthogonal Disentanglement for LVLM Hallucination Mitigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.25377/) (2026)
- [Sparse Visual Thought Circuits in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25075/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) bridge the gap between visual and linguistic modalities, demonstrating strong potential across a variety of domains. However, despite significant progress, LVLMs still suffer from severe hallucination issues in object recognition tasks. These models often fail to accurately identify certain objects, leading to text generation that appears fluent but does not correspond to the visual content, which can have serious consequences in real-world applications. Recently, several methods have been proposed to alleviate LVLM hallucinations, but most focus solely on reducing hallucinations in the language modality. To mitigate hallucinations in both the language and visual modalities, we introduce Hallucination Disentangled Decoding (HDD) method that requires no training. HDD enhances the original image by segmenting it and selecting images that augment the original, while also utilizing a blank image to eliminate language prior hallucinations in both the original and segmented images. This design not only reduces the model's dependence on language priors but also enhances its visual performance. (Code: https://github.com/rickeyhhh/Hallucination-Disentangled-Decoding)