# EnsemHalDet: Robust VLM Hallucination Detection via Ensemble of Internal State Detectors

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.02784 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02784/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 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 14 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Apr 2026.

## 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)

- [InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14238/) (2023)
- [Inference-Time Intervention: Eliciting Truthful Answers from a Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03341/) (2023)
- [FActScore: Fine-grained Atomic Evaluation of Factual Precision in Long Form Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14251/) (2023)
- [The Geometry of Truth: Emergent Linear Structure in Large Language Model Representations of True/False Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06824/) (2023)
- [MMMU-Pro: A More Robust Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02813/) (2024)
- [Six Challenges for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03872/) (2017)
- [Devils in Middle Layers of Large Vision-Language Models: Interpreting, Detecting and Mitigating Object Hallucinations via Attention Lens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16724/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Uncertainty-Based Hallucination Detection with Stronger Focus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13230/) (2023)
- [Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models via DPO: On-Policy Data Hold the Key](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09695/) (2025)
- [PhD: A ChatGPT-Prompted Visual hallucination Evaluation Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11116/) (2024)
- [Mitigating Modality Prior-Induced Hallucinations in Multimodal Large Language Models via Deciphering Attention Causality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04780/) (2024)
- [Verify when Uncertain: Beyond Self-Consistency in Black Box Hallucination Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15845/) (2025)
- [CRAG-MM: Multi-modal Multi-turn Comprehensive RAG Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.26160/) (2025)
- [HalluShift++: Bridging Language and Vision through Internal Representation Shifts for Hierarchical Hallucinations in MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07687/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Locating Answer-Correctness Signals in Frozen Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.37700/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel at multimodal tasks, but they remain vulnerable to hallucinations that are factually incorrect or ungrounded in the input image. Recent work suggests that hallucination detection using internal representations is more efficient and accurate than approaches that rely solely on model outputs. However, existing internal-representation-based methods typically rely on a single representation or detector, limiting their ability to capture diverse hallucination signals. In this paper, we propose EnsemHalDet, an ensemble-based hallucination detection framework that leverages multiple internal representations of VLMs, including attention outputs and hidden states. EnsemHalDet trains independent detectors for each representation and combines them through ensemble learning. Experimental results across multiple VQA datasets and VLMs show that EnsemHalDet consistently outperforms prior methods and single-detector models in terms of AUC. These results demonstrate that ensembling diverse internal signals significantly improves robustness in multimodal hallucination detection.
