The paper introduces SAGE, a lightweight method that guides decoder attention in vision-language models away from prompt‑invariant attention sinks (PIS) toward query‑dependent regions of interest (ROIs). By using token‑aligned ROI masks from vision backbones like CLIP, ViT, and DINOv3, SAGE improves visual grounding and reduces hallucinations across various VLM families. Experiments show consistent gains on public vision‑language benchmarks, especially in fine‑grained visual discrimination tasks where localized evidence is essential.
arXiv:2605. 08245v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) increasingly power high-stakes applications, from medical imaging to autonomous systems, yet they routinely hallucinate, confidently describing content not present in the input.
arXiv:2607. 24017v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The empirical success of attention mechanism in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) often obscures its inherent, subtle flaws.
The paper introduces Visual Retrieval Heads (VRHs), a small fraction of attention heads in vision‑language models that are causally responsible for grounding text descriptions to image regions. By recasting head‑scoring methods and evaluating across eleven VLMs and five benchmarks, the authors show that masking the top 20 VRHs can drop grounding accuracy by up to 80 percentage points, while random masking has little effect. VRHs generalize across various visual reference tasks, preserve output format while corrupting localization, and transfer causally across models sharing an LLM backbone.
arXiv:2606. 29431v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Despite the impressive capabilities of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), they remain susceptible to hallucination, generating content inconsistent with the input image.
arXiv:2606. 31054v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are critically hampered by hallucination, generating content inconsistent with the provided image.
arXiv:2606. 23763v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent work typically assesses vision--language consistency using attention distributions of answer-side tokens.
arXiv:2608.21819v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reliable image captioning in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) requires captions to be both precise and complete, avoiding unsupported object mentions wh...
The paper demonstrates that vision‑language models (VLMs) possess a small set of attention heads, called Visual Retrieval Heads (VRHs), that are causally responsible for linking text prompts to specific image regions. By adapting head‑scoring techniques from language models, the authors identify VRHs as the heads whose attention from output prediction tokens, summed over the ground‑truth referent region, most reliably indicates causal grounding. Experiments across eleven VLMs and five referring‑expression benchmarks show that masking the top 20 VRHs can drop grounding accuracy by up to 80 percentage points, while random masking has little effect, and that VRHs generalize across diverse visual tasks and transfer across models sharing an LLM backbone.
arXiv:2608.29092v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large vision-language models (LVLMs) frequently generate content unsupported by visual inputs. Preliminary experiments show that visual evidence is pri...
ReWEIGH the Evidence is a training‑free decoding technique that calibrates token‑level ordinal visual evidence to reduce hallucinations in large vision‑language models. It aggregates vocabulary ranks across visual positions, compares candidates to a token‑specific reference derived from unlabeled images, and applies a bounded penalty only when evidence falls below this reference. Experiments on four 7B backbones show up to a 21.3% reduction in hallucinated object mentions while largely preserving or improving descriptive and general performance, with minimal added latency.
arXiv:2608. 07302v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) often suffer from object hallucination, generating objects that are absent from the image.
The paper introduces the concept of multi-view hallucination (MVH), where large vision-language models produce incorrect answers when processing images from multiple viewpoints. It presents MVH-Bench, a benchmark of 4.8k question-answer pairs that target cross-instance and cross-view hallucinations, and shows that MVH is common across recent models. The authors propose Reference Shift Contrastive Decoding (RSCD), a training-free decoding method that mitigates visual interference, achieving significant performance gains on MVH-Bench with LLaVA-OneVision and Qwen2.5-VL.