HIME: Mitigating Object Hallucinations in LVLMs via Hallucination Insensitivity Model Editing

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Akl, Ahmed, Khamis, Abdelwahed, Cheraghian, Ali, Wang, Zhe, Khalifa, Sara, Wang, Kewen
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Akl, Ahmed
Khamis, Abdelwahed
Cheraghian, Ali
Wang, Zhe
Khalifa, Sara
Wang, Kewen
author_facet Akl, Ahmed
Khamis, Abdelwahed
Cheraghian, Ali
Wang, Zhe
Khalifa, Sara
Wang, Kewen
contents Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated impressive multimodal understanding capabilities, yet they remain prone to object hallucination, where models describe non-existent objects or attribute incorrect factual information, raising serious concerns for reliable real-world deployment. While fine-tuning is a commonly adopted mitigation strategy, its high computational cost and practical difficulty motivate the need for training-free alternatives, among which model editing has recently emerged as a promising direction. However, indiscriminate editing risks disrupting the rich implicit knowledge encoded in pre-trained LVLMs, leading to a fundamental question: how much intervention is necessary at each layer to suppress hallucinations while preserving pre-trained knowledge? To address this question, we present a systematic analysis of LVLM decoders built on three widely used large language model backbones-Qwen, LLaMA, and Vicuna-revealing clear layer-wise differences in susceptibility to object hallucination. Building on these insights, we introduce the Hallucination Insensitivity Score (HIS), a principled metric that quantifies each layer's sensitivity to hallucination and provides guidance for targeted intervention. Leveraging HIS, we propose Hallucination Insensitivity Model Editing (HIME), a simple yet effective layer-adaptive weight editing approach that selectively modifies latent features to suppress hallucinations while preserving pre-trained knowledge. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HIME reduces hallucinations by an average of 61.8% across open-ended generation benchmarks, including CHAIR, MME, and GPT-4V-aided evaluation, without introducing additional parameters, inference-time latency, or computational overhead.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_18711
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle HIME: Mitigating Object Hallucinations in LVLMs via Hallucination Insensitivity Model Editing
Akl, Ahmed
Khamis, Abdelwahed
Cheraghian, Ali
Wang, Zhe
Khalifa, Sara
Wang, Kewen
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated impressive multimodal understanding capabilities, yet they remain prone to object hallucination, where models describe non-existent objects or attribute incorrect factual information, raising serious concerns for reliable real-world deployment. While fine-tuning is a commonly adopted mitigation strategy, its high computational cost and practical difficulty motivate the need for training-free alternatives, among which model editing has recently emerged as a promising direction. However, indiscriminate editing risks disrupting the rich implicit knowledge encoded in pre-trained LVLMs, leading to a fundamental question: how much intervention is necessary at each layer to suppress hallucinations while preserving pre-trained knowledge? To address this question, we present a systematic analysis of LVLM decoders built on three widely used large language model backbones-Qwen, LLaMA, and Vicuna-revealing clear layer-wise differences in susceptibility to object hallucination. Building on these insights, we introduce the Hallucination Insensitivity Score (HIS), a principled metric that quantifies each layer's sensitivity to hallucination and provides guidance for targeted intervention. Leveraging HIS, we propose Hallucination Insensitivity Model Editing (HIME), a simple yet effective layer-adaptive weight editing approach that selectively modifies latent features to suppress hallucinations while preserving pre-trained knowledge. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HIME reduces hallucinations by an average of 61.8% across open-ended generation benchmarks, including CHAIR, MME, and GPT-4V-aided evaluation, without introducing additional parameters, inference-time latency, or computational overhead.
title HIME: Mitigating Object Hallucinations in LVLMs via Hallucination Insensitivity Model Editing
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.18711