Leveraging Visual Signals for Robust Token-Level Uncertainty in Vision-Language Generation
On the map: Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models → Hallucination mitigation in LVLMs
Abstract (arXiv)
Uncertainty quantification (UQ) remains a critical challenge in Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) for reliable predictions and real-world deployment. However, most existing methods are adapted from the LLM literature and primarily focus on the language modality, leaving the contribution of visual information to LVLM uncertainty largely underexplored. In this paper, we investigate how LVLMs process visual information and whether this process can be used to improve uncertainty estimation. By analyzing hidden representations after the integration of visual features during the generation process, we observe that high-confidence predictions rely more heavily on visual content than uncertain ones. Building on this insight, we propose Visual-Grounded Token UQ (VIG-TUQ), a training-free framework that explicitly incorporates visual grounding into uncertainty estimation by weighting token-level language uncertainty with visual grounding scores. We evaluate VIG-TUQ on multiple datasets and across diverse LVLM architectures, including early-fusion, late-fusion, and native-fusion models. Results indicate that our method often improves upon existing token-level uncertainty approaches. Code and data will be made available upon acceptance.
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 106 of its 133 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 26 May 2026.
Builds on
106 of 133 references.
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- 2024MetaToken: Detecting Hallucination in Image Descriptions by Meta Classification29 May
- 2024A Survey on Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models1 Feb
Other references · 101
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