Visual hallucination detection in large vision-language models via evidential conflict

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Huang, Tao, Liu, Zhekun, Wang, Rui, Zhang, Yang, Jing, Liping
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Huang, Tao
Liu, Zhekun
Wang, Rui
Zhang, Yang
Jing, Liping
author_facet Huang, Tao
Liu, Zhekun
Wang, Rui
Zhang, Yang
Jing, Liping
contents Despite the remarkable multimodal capabilities of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), discrepancies often occur between visual inputs and textual outputs--a phenomenon we term visual hallucination. This critical reliability gap poses substantial risks in safety-critical Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications, necessitating a comprehensive evaluation benchmark and effective detection methods. Firstly, we observe that existing visual-centric hallucination benchmarks mainly assess LVLMs from a perception perspective, overlooking hallucinations arising from advanced reasoning capabilities. We develop the Perception-Reasoning Evaluation Hallucination (PRE-HAL) dataset, which enables the systematic evaluation of both perception and reasoning capabilities of LVLMs across multiple visual semantics, such as instances, scenes, and relations. Comprehensive evaluation with this new benchmark exposed more visual vulnerabilities, particularly in the more challenging task of relation reasoning. To address this issue, we propose, to the best of our knowledge, the first Dempster-Shafer theory (DST)-based visual hallucination detection method for LVLMs through uncertainty estimation. This method aims to efficiently capture the degree of conflict in high-level features at the model inference phase. Specifically, our approach employs simple mass functions to mitigate the computational complexity of evidence combination on power sets. We conduct an extensive evaluation of state-of-the-art LVLMs, LLaVA-v1.5, mPLUG-Owl2 and mPLUG-Owl3, with the new PRE-HAL benchmark. Experimental results indicate that our method outperforms five baseline uncertainty metrics, achieving average AUROC improvements of 4%, 10%, and 7% across three LVLMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/HT86159/Evidential-Conflict.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_19513
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Visual hallucination detection in large vision-language models via evidential conflict
Huang, Tao
Liu, Zhekun
Wang, Rui
Zhang, Yang
Jing, Liping
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Despite the remarkable multimodal capabilities of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), discrepancies often occur between visual inputs and textual outputs--a phenomenon we term visual hallucination. This critical reliability gap poses substantial risks in safety-critical Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications, necessitating a comprehensive evaluation benchmark and effective detection methods. Firstly, we observe that existing visual-centric hallucination benchmarks mainly assess LVLMs from a perception perspective, overlooking hallucinations arising from advanced reasoning capabilities. We develop the Perception-Reasoning Evaluation Hallucination (PRE-HAL) dataset, which enables the systematic evaluation of both perception and reasoning capabilities of LVLMs across multiple visual semantics, such as instances, scenes, and relations. Comprehensive evaluation with this new benchmark exposed more visual vulnerabilities, particularly in the more challenging task of relation reasoning. To address this issue, we propose, to the best of our knowledge, the first Dempster-Shafer theory (DST)-based visual hallucination detection method for LVLMs through uncertainty estimation. This method aims to efficiently capture the degree of conflict in high-level features at the model inference phase. Specifically, our approach employs simple mass functions to mitigate the computational complexity of evidence combination on power sets. We conduct an extensive evaluation of state-of-the-art LVLMs, LLaVA-v1.5, mPLUG-Owl2 and mPLUG-Owl3, with the new PRE-HAL benchmark. Experimental results indicate that our method outperforms five baseline uncertainty metrics, achieving average AUROC improvements of 4%, 10%, and 7% across three LVLMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/HT86159/Evidential-Conflict.
title Visual hallucination detection in large vision-language models via evidential conflict
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.19513