Taming Hallucinations: Boosting MLLMs' Video Understanding via Counterfactual Video Generation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Huang, Zhe, Wen, Hao, Hao, Aiming, Song, Bingze, Wu, Meiqi, Wu, Jiahong, Chu, Xiangxiang, Lu, Sheng, Wang, Haoqian
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Huang, Zhe
Wen, Hao
Hao, Aiming
Song, Bingze
Wu, Meiqi
Wu, Jiahong
Chu, Xiangxiang
Lu, Sheng
Wang, Haoqian
author_facet Huang, Zhe
Wen, Hao
Hao, Aiming
Song, Bingze
Wu, Meiqi
Wu, Jiahong
Chu, Xiangxiang
Lu, Sheng
Wang, Haoqian
contents Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have made remarkable progress in video understanding. However, they suffer from a critical vulnerability: an over-reliance on language priors, which can lead to visual ungrounded hallucinations, especially when processing counterfactual videos that defy common sense. This limitation, stemming from the intrinsic data imbalance between text and video, is challenging to address due to the substantial cost of collecting and annotating counterfactual data. To address this, we introduce DualityForge, a novel counterfactual data synthesis framework that employs controllable, diffusion-based video editing to transform real-world videos into counterfactual scenarios. By embedding structured contextual information into the video editing and QA generation processes, the framework automatically produces high-quality QA pairs together with original-edited video pairs for contrastive training. Based on this, we build DualityVidQA, a large-scale video dataset designed to reduce MLLM hallucinations. In addition, to fully exploit the contrastive nature of our paired data, we propose Duality-Normalized Advantage Training (DNA-Train), a two-stage SFT-RL training regime where the RL phase applies pair-wise $\ell_1$ advantage normalization, thereby enabling a more stable and efficient policy optimization. Experiments on DualityVidQA-Test demonstrate that our method substantially reduces model hallucinations on counterfactual videos, yielding a relative improvement of 24.0% over the Qwen2.5-VL-7B baseline. Moreover, our approach achieves significant gains across both hallucination and general-purpose benchmarks, indicating strong generalization capability. We will open-source our dataset and code.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_24271
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Taming Hallucinations: Boosting MLLMs' Video Understanding via Counterfactual Video Generation
Huang, Zhe
Wen, Hao
Hao, Aiming
Song, Bingze
Wu, Meiqi
Wu, Jiahong
Chu, Xiangxiang
Lu, Sheng
Wang, Haoqian
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have made remarkable progress in video understanding. However, they suffer from a critical vulnerability: an over-reliance on language priors, which can lead to visual ungrounded hallucinations, especially when processing counterfactual videos that defy common sense. This limitation, stemming from the intrinsic data imbalance between text and video, is challenging to address due to the substantial cost of collecting and annotating counterfactual data. To address this, we introduce DualityForge, a novel counterfactual data synthesis framework that employs controllable, diffusion-based video editing to transform real-world videos into counterfactual scenarios. By embedding structured contextual information into the video editing and QA generation processes, the framework automatically produces high-quality QA pairs together with original-edited video pairs for contrastive training. Based on this, we build DualityVidQA, a large-scale video dataset designed to reduce MLLM hallucinations. In addition, to fully exploit the contrastive nature of our paired data, we propose Duality-Normalized Advantage Training (DNA-Train), a two-stage SFT-RL training regime where the RL phase applies pair-wise $\ell_1$ advantage normalization, thereby enabling a more stable and efficient policy optimization. Experiments on DualityVidQA-Test demonstrate that our method substantially reduces model hallucinations on counterfactual videos, yielding a relative improvement of 24.0% over the Qwen2.5-VL-7B baseline. Moreover, our approach achieves significant gains across both hallucination and general-purpose benchmarks, indicating strong generalization capability. We will open-source our dataset and code.
title Taming Hallucinations: Boosting MLLMs' Video Understanding via Counterfactual Video Generation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24271