Tell Model Where to Look: Mitigating Hallucinations in MLLMs by Vision-Guided Attention

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhao, Jianfei, Zhang, Feng, Sun, Xin, Feng, Chong, Tan, Zhixing
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zhao, Jianfei
Zhang, Feng
Sun, Xin
Feng, Chong
Tan, Zhixing
author_facet Zhao, Jianfei
Zhang, Feng
Sun, Xin
Feng, Chong
Tan, Zhixing
contents Visual attention serves as the primary mechanism through which MLLMs interpret visual information; however, its limited localization capability often leads to hallucinations. We observe that although MLLMs can accurately extract visual semantics from visual tokens, they fail to fully leverage this advantage during subsequent inference. To address this limitation, we propose Vision-Guided Attention (VGA), a training-free method that first constructs precise visual grounding by exploiting the semantic content of visual tokens, and then uses this grounding to guide the model's focus toward relevant visual regions. In image captioning, VGA further refines this guidance dynamically during generation by suppressing regions that have already been described. In VGA, each token undergoes only a single forward pass, introducing a negligible latency overhead. In addition, VGA is fully compatible with efficient attention implementations such as FlashAttention. Extensive experiments across diverse MLLMs and multiple hallucination benchmarks demonstrate that VGA achieves state-of-the-art dehallucination performance. Further analysis confirms that explicit visual guidance plays a crucial role in enhancing the visual understanding capabilities of MLLMs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_20032
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Tell Model Where to Look: Mitigating Hallucinations in MLLMs by Vision-Guided Attention
Zhao, Jianfei
Zhang, Feng
Sun, Xin
Feng, Chong
Tan, Zhixing
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Visual attention serves as the primary mechanism through which MLLMs interpret visual information; however, its limited localization capability often leads to hallucinations. We observe that although MLLMs can accurately extract visual semantics from visual tokens, they fail to fully leverage this advantage during subsequent inference. To address this limitation, we propose Vision-Guided Attention (VGA), a training-free method that first constructs precise visual grounding by exploiting the semantic content of visual tokens, and then uses this grounding to guide the model's focus toward relevant visual regions. In image captioning, VGA further refines this guidance dynamically during generation by suppressing regions that have already been described. In VGA, each token undergoes only a single forward pass, introducing a negligible latency overhead. In addition, VGA is fully compatible with efficient attention implementations such as FlashAttention. Extensive experiments across diverse MLLMs and multiple hallucination benchmarks demonstrate that VGA achieves state-of-the-art dehallucination performance. Further analysis confirms that explicit visual guidance plays a crucial role in enhancing the visual understanding capabilities of MLLMs.
title Tell Model Where to Look: Mitigating Hallucinations in MLLMs by Vision-Guided Attention
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20032