Mitigating Hallucinations in Multimodal LLMs via Object-aware Preference Optimization

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Hauptverfasser: Compagnoni, Alberto, Caffagni, Davide, Moratelli, Nicholas, Baraldi, Lorenzo, Cornia, Marcella, Cucchiara, Rita
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Compagnoni, Alberto
Caffagni, Davide
Moratelli, Nicholas
Baraldi, Lorenzo
Cornia, Marcella
Cucchiara, Rita
author_facet Compagnoni, Alberto
Caffagni, Davide
Moratelli, Nicholas
Baraldi, Lorenzo
Cornia, Marcella
Cucchiara, Rita
contents Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) emerge as a unified interface to address a multitude of tasks, ranging from NLP to computer vision. Despite showcasing state-of-the-art results in many benchmarks, a long-standing issue is the tendency of MLLMs to hallucinate, that is to generate answers to the user's query that are not reflected in the visual input. In this paper, we address the problem of hallucinations as an alignment problem, seeking to steer the MLLM so that it prefers generating content without hallucinations. In contrast to recent approaches that require complicated pipelines to build synthetic preference data for alignment training, often relying on proprietary models, we capitalize on the well-known CHAIR metric, originally proposed to gauge the degree of hallucinations in image captioning. Given a pair of generated answers, we leverage CHAIR to distinguish winner and loser options (i.e., non-hallucinated and hallucinated samples) and fine-tune off-the-shelf MLLMs via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). The resulting method, which we refer to as CHAIR-DPO, effectively diminishes the amount of hallucinated answers on several hallucination benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness of fine-tuning the MLLM with a CHAIR-based reward. Source code and trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/aimagelab/CHAIR-DPO.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_20181
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Mitigating Hallucinations in Multimodal LLMs via Object-aware Preference Optimization
Compagnoni, Alberto
Caffagni, Davide
Moratelli, Nicholas
Baraldi, Lorenzo
Cornia, Marcella
Cucchiara, Rita
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Multimedia
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) emerge as a unified interface to address a multitude of tasks, ranging from NLP to computer vision. Despite showcasing state-of-the-art results in many benchmarks, a long-standing issue is the tendency of MLLMs to hallucinate, that is to generate answers to the user's query that are not reflected in the visual input. In this paper, we address the problem of hallucinations as an alignment problem, seeking to steer the MLLM so that it prefers generating content without hallucinations. In contrast to recent approaches that require complicated pipelines to build synthetic preference data for alignment training, often relying on proprietary models, we capitalize on the well-known CHAIR metric, originally proposed to gauge the degree of hallucinations in image captioning. Given a pair of generated answers, we leverage CHAIR to distinguish winner and loser options (i.e., non-hallucinated and hallucinated samples) and fine-tune off-the-shelf MLLMs via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). The resulting method, which we refer to as CHAIR-DPO, effectively diminishes the amount of hallucinated answers on several hallucination benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness of fine-tuning the MLLM with a CHAIR-based reward. Source code and trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/aimagelab/CHAIR-DPO.
title Mitigating Hallucinations in Multimodal LLMs via Object-aware Preference Optimization
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Multimedia
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.20181