CHASD: Language Increment-Calibrated Contrastive Decoding against Hallucination in LVLMs

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Huang, Xiaoyi, Zhang, Kejia, Luo, Zhiming
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Huang, Xiaoyi
Zhang, Kejia
Luo, Zhiming
author_facet Huang, Xiaoyi
Zhang, Kejia
Luo, Zhiming
contents Large Vision-Language Models have shown strong multimodal reasoning capabilities, yet they remain susceptible to object hallucinations when language priors dominate insufficient or misaligned visual evidence. Training-free contrastive decoding methods mitigate this issue by comparing predictions from original and perturbed visual inputs, but existing approaches either apply global perturbations that may alter useful visual evidence or invoke an additional negative branch at every decoding step. In this paper, we observe that hallucination risks are transient and token-specific: visual attention shifts across generated tokens, while some functional tokens are produced with high confidence and do not require contrastive calibration. Based on this observation, we propose Contrastive Hallucination-Aware Step-wise Decoding (CHASD) for Large Vision-Language Models, an inference-time framework for "calibration on demand". CHASD uses an uncertainty-driven confidence gate to activate the contrastive branch only when the maximum probability of the next-token is less than the threshold, and constructs the negative branch through attention-guided localized perturbations of the currently salient visual tokens. This design reduces unnecessary negative-branch forward passes while preserving the original distribution for high-confidence steps. Experiments on POPE, AMBER, MME, MMHal-Bench, and CHAIR show that CHASD improves hallucination-related metrics over strong training-free baselines with competitive inference efficiency.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_23344
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CHASD: Language Increment-Calibrated Contrastive Decoding against Hallucination in LVLMs
Huang, Xiaoyi
Zhang, Kejia
Luo, Zhiming
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Large Vision-Language Models have shown strong multimodal reasoning capabilities, yet they remain susceptible to object hallucinations when language priors dominate insufficient or misaligned visual evidence. Training-free contrastive decoding methods mitigate this issue by comparing predictions from original and perturbed visual inputs, but existing approaches either apply global perturbations that may alter useful visual evidence or invoke an additional negative branch at every decoding step. In this paper, we observe that hallucination risks are transient and token-specific: visual attention shifts across generated tokens, while some functional tokens are produced with high confidence and do not require contrastive calibration. Based on this observation, we propose Contrastive Hallucination-Aware Step-wise Decoding (CHASD) for Large Vision-Language Models, an inference-time framework for "calibration on demand". CHASD uses an uncertainty-driven confidence gate to activate the contrastive branch only when the maximum probability of the next-token is less than the threshold, and constructs the negative branch through attention-guided localized perturbations of the currently salient visual tokens. This design reduces unnecessary negative-branch forward passes while preserving the original distribution for high-confidence steps. Experiments on POPE, AMBER, MME, MMHal-Bench, and CHAIR show that CHASD improves hallucination-related metrics over strong training-free baselines with competitive inference efficiency.
title CHASD: Language Increment-Calibrated Contrastive Decoding against Hallucination in LVLMs
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23344