# Look Clearly Before Answering: Mitigating Hallucinations in LVLMs via Saliency-Driven Perceptual Realignment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.16841 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.16841/

## 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 27 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Jul 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, 27 of 27)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14238/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10355/) (2023)
- [MME: A Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13394/) (2023)
- [Eyes Wide Shut? Exploring the Visual Shortcomings of Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06209/) (2024)
- [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)
- [MMMU-Pro: A More Robust Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02813/) (2024)
- [DoLa: Decoding by Contrasting Layers Improves Factuality in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03883/) (2023)
- [MME-RealWorld: Could Your Multimodal LLM Challenge High-Resolution Real-World Scenarios that are Difficult for Humans?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13257/) (2024)
- [Gated Attention for Large Language Models: Non-linearity, Sparsity, and Attention-Sink-Free](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.06708/) (2025)
- [Multi-Modal Hallucination Control by Visual Information Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14003/) (2024)
- [When Attention Sink Emerges in Language Models: An Empirical View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10781/) (2024)
- [Scalable Best-of-N Selection for Large Language Models via Self-Certainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18581/) (2025)
- [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)
- [See What You Are Told: Visual Attention Sink in Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03321/) (2025)
- [Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models via DPO: On-Policy Data Hold the Key](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09695/) (2025)
- [Don't Miss the Forest for the Trees: Attentional Vision Calibration for Large Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17820/) (2024)
- [Nullu: Mitigating Object Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models via HalluSpace Projection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13817/) (2024)
- [ClearSight: Visual Signal Enhancement for Object Hallucination Mitigation in Multimodal Large language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13107/) (2025)
- [Mitigating Object Hallucinations via Sentence-Level Early Intervention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12455/) (2025)
- [ONLY: One-Layer Intervention Sufficiently Mitigates Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00898/) (2025)
- [Understanding Language Prior of LVLMs by Contrasting Chain-of-Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23050/) (2025)
- [Mixture of Decoding: An Attention-Inspired Adaptive Decoding Strategy to Mitigate Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17061/) (2025)
- [Cross-Layer Vision Smoothing: Enhancing Visual Understanding via Sustained Focus on Key Objects in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12897/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in multimodal understanding. However, they remain prone to hallucinations, generating responses that are inconsistent with the visual evidence. Existing mitigation methods largely address language-prior bias or cross-modal imbalance, while progressive visual degradation across perception and memory remains underexplored. In this work, we propose Saliency-Driven Perceptual Realignment (SDPR), a training-free framework that mitigates the degradation of visual awareness throughout inference. Specifically, we first introduce saliency-driven attention redistribution to release attention hijacked by non-semantic sink tokens, thereby recovering critical visual evidence. Second, we identify spatial distortion in the KV cache and propose saliency-driven cache alignment to preserve query-relevant visual features during generation. Finally, we introduce prior-constrained contrastive decoding to penalize unfaithful predictions induced by dominant language priors. Our proposed SDPR is robust against hallucinations due to its holistic alignment of visual awareness across the entire generative trajectory. Extensive experiments across diverse LVLM architectures show that SDPR outperforms state-of-the-art methods on both hallucination and general-purpose benchmarks, requiring no additional training and incurring minimal runtime overhead. The code is available hrefhttps://github.com/PengSyuChen/SDPRcolorbluehere.