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| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2025
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15435 |
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| _version_ | 1866911697791352832 |
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| author | Yu, Chung-En Johnny Jalaian, Brian Bastian, Nathaniel D. |
| author_facet | Yu, Chung-En Johnny Jalaian, Brian Bastian, Nathaniel D. |
| contents | Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) exhibit strong multimodal capabilities but remain vulnerable to hallucinations from intrinsic errors and adversarial attacks from external exploitations, limiting their reliability in real-world applications. We present ORCA, an agentic reasoning framework that improves the factual accuracy and adversarial robustness of pretrained LVLMs through inference-time structured inference reasoning with a suite of small vision models (less than 3B parameters). ORCA operates via an Observe-Reason-Critique-Act loop, querying multiple visual tools with evidential questions, validating cross-model inconsistencies, and refining predictions iteratively without access to model internals or retraining. ORCA also stores intermediate reasoning traces, which supports auditable decision-making. Though designed primarily to mitigate object-level hallucinations, ORCA also exhibits emergent adversarial robustness without requiring adversarial training or defense mechanisms. We evaluate ORCA across three settings: (1) clean images on hallucination benchmarks, (2) adversarially perturbed images without defense, and (3) adversarially perturbed images with defense applied. On the POPE hallucination benchmark, ORCA improves standalone LVLMs performance by +3.64% to +40.67% across different subsets. Under adversarial perturbations on POPE, ORCA achieves an average accuracy gain of +20.11% across LVLMs. When combined with defense techniques on adversarially perturbed AMBER images, ORCA further improves standalone LVLM performance, with gains ranging from +1.20% to +48.00% across metrics. These results demonstrate that ORCA offers a promising path toward building more reliable and robust multimodal systems. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_15435 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | ORCA: An Agentic Reasoning Framework for Hallucination and Adversarial Robustness in Vision-Language Models Yu, Chung-En Johnny Jalaian, Brian Bastian, Nathaniel D. Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Artificial Intelligence Multiagent Systems Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) exhibit strong multimodal capabilities but remain vulnerable to hallucinations from intrinsic errors and adversarial attacks from external exploitations, limiting their reliability in real-world applications. We present ORCA, an agentic reasoning framework that improves the factual accuracy and adversarial robustness of pretrained LVLMs through inference-time structured inference reasoning with a suite of small vision models (less than 3B parameters). ORCA operates via an Observe-Reason-Critique-Act loop, querying multiple visual tools with evidential questions, validating cross-model inconsistencies, and refining predictions iteratively without access to model internals or retraining. ORCA also stores intermediate reasoning traces, which supports auditable decision-making. Though designed primarily to mitigate object-level hallucinations, ORCA also exhibits emergent adversarial robustness without requiring adversarial training or defense mechanisms. We evaluate ORCA across three settings: (1) clean images on hallucination benchmarks, (2) adversarially perturbed images without defense, and (3) adversarially perturbed images with defense applied. On the POPE hallucination benchmark, ORCA improves standalone LVLMs performance by +3.64% to +40.67% across different subsets. Under adversarial perturbations on POPE, ORCA achieves an average accuracy gain of +20.11% across LVLMs. When combined with defense techniques on adversarially perturbed AMBER images, ORCA further improves standalone LVLM performance, with gains ranging from +1.20% to +48.00% across metrics. These results demonstrate that ORCA offers a promising path toward building more reliable and robust multimodal systems. |
| title | ORCA: An Agentic Reasoning Framework for Hallucination and Adversarial Robustness in Vision-Language Models |
| topic | Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Artificial Intelligence Multiagent Systems |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15435 |