SAVE: Sparse Autoencoder-Driven Visual Information Enhancement for Mitigating Object Hallucination

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Park, Sangha, Yoo, Seungryong, Mok, Jisoo, Yoon, Sungroh
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Park, Sangha
Yoo, Seungryong
Mok, Jisoo
Yoon, Sungroh
author_facet Park, Sangha
Yoo, Seungryong
Mok, Jisoo
Yoon, Sungroh
contents Although Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have advanced substantially, they remain vulnerable to object hallucination caused by language priors and visual information loss. To address this, we propose SAVE (Sparse Autoencoder-Driven Visual Information Enhancement), a framework that mitigates hallucination by steering the model along Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) latent features. A binary object-presence question-answering probe identifies the SAE features most indicative of the model's visual information processing, referred to as visual understanding features. Steering the model along these identified features reinforces grounded visual understanding and effectively reduces hallucination. With its simple design, SAVE outperforms state-of-the-art training-free methods on standard benchmarks, achieving a 10\%p improvement in CHAIR\_S and consistent gains on POPE and MMHal-Bench. Extensive evaluations across multiple models and layers confirm the robustness and generalizability of our approach. Further analysis reveals that steering along visual understanding features suppresses the generation of uncertain object tokens and increases attention to image tokens, mitigating hallucination. Code is released at https://github.com/wiarae/SAVE.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_07730
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SAVE: Sparse Autoencoder-Driven Visual Information Enhancement for Mitigating Object Hallucination
Park, Sangha
Yoo, Seungryong
Mok, Jisoo
Yoon, Sungroh
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Although Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have advanced substantially, they remain vulnerable to object hallucination caused by language priors and visual information loss. To address this, we propose SAVE (Sparse Autoencoder-Driven Visual Information Enhancement), a framework that mitigates hallucination by steering the model along Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) latent features. A binary object-presence question-answering probe identifies the SAE features most indicative of the model's visual information processing, referred to as visual understanding features. Steering the model along these identified features reinforces grounded visual understanding and effectively reduces hallucination. With its simple design, SAVE outperforms state-of-the-art training-free methods on standard benchmarks, achieving a 10\%p improvement in CHAIR\_S and consistent gains on POPE and MMHal-Bench. Extensive evaluations across multiple models and layers confirm the robustness and generalizability of our approach. Further analysis reveals that steering along visual understanding features suppresses the generation of uncertain object tokens and increases attention to image tokens, mitigating hallucination. Code is released at https://github.com/wiarae/SAVE.
title SAVE: Sparse Autoencoder-Driven Visual Information Enhancement for Mitigating Object Hallucination
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.07730