What Makes LVLMs Hallucinate Less? Unveiling the Architectural Factors Behind Hallucination Robustness

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Main Authors: He, Yusheng, Zhou, Jizhe, Du, Xia, Lin, Zheng, Luo, Jun, Lv, Jiancheng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author He, Yusheng
Zhou, Jizhe
Du, Xia
Lin, Zheng
Luo, Jun
Lv, Jiancheng
author_facet He, Yusheng
Zhou, Jizhe
Du, Xia
Lin, Zheng
Luo, Jun
Lv, Jiancheng
contents Hallucination remains one of the key challenges undermining the reliability of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). But what makes an LVLM hallucinate less? Many existing efforts focus on improving internal components of the model. We argue that hallucination fundamentally stems from how the model architecture is designed. To investigate this, we factor the architecture design into three dimensions: Linguistic Foundation (LF), Visual Representation (VR), and Semantic Alignment (SA), and categorize hallucinations into Co-occurrence, Similarity, and previously overlooked Uncertainty types. Building on this formulation, we propose CoSimUE, a benchmark that creates fine-grained hallucination scenarios through controlled textual perturbations and random perturbations, enabling mapping between design choices and hallucination behaviors. Experiments across 7 design aspects show that: 1) the widely emphasized scaling of model parameters has only limited impact on reducing all three types of hallucinations; 2) larger and better-trained language foundations can reduce co-occurrence hallucinations; 3) stronger visual encoders and higher resolutions mitigate similarity errors; 4) effective alignment strategies alleviate uncertainty hallucinations. 5) Furthermore, cross-dimensional analysis reveals that jointly enhancing visual fidelity and alignment quality yields the most comprehensive improvements. This study provides the first systematic exploration linking architecture-level design to hallucination robustness, offering practical guidance for developing reliable and efficient LVLMs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_30911
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle What Makes LVLMs Hallucinate Less? Unveiling the Architectural Factors Behind Hallucination Robustness
He, Yusheng
Zhou, Jizhe
Du, Xia
Lin, Zheng
Luo, Jun
Lv, Jiancheng
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Hallucination remains one of the key challenges undermining the reliability of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). But what makes an LVLM hallucinate less? Many existing efforts focus on improving internal components of the model. We argue that hallucination fundamentally stems from how the model architecture is designed. To investigate this, we factor the architecture design into three dimensions: Linguistic Foundation (LF), Visual Representation (VR), and Semantic Alignment (SA), and categorize hallucinations into Co-occurrence, Similarity, and previously overlooked Uncertainty types. Building on this formulation, we propose CoSimUE, a benchmark that creates fine-grained hallucination scenarios through controlled textual perturbations and random perturbations, enabling mapping between design choices and hallucination behaviors. Experiments across 7 design aspects show that: 1) the widely emphasized scaling of model parameters has only limited impact on reducing all three types of hallucinations; 2) larger and better-trained language foundations can reduce co-occurrence hallucinations; 3) stronger visual encoders and higher resolutions mitigate similarity errors; 4) effective alignment strategies alleviate uncertainty hallucinations. 5) Furthermore, cross-dimensional analysis reveals that jointly enhancing visual fidelity and alignment quality yields the most comprehensive improvements. This study provides the first systematic exploration linking architecture-level design to hallucination robustness, offering practical guidance for developing reliable and efficient LVLMs.
title What Makes LVLMs Hallucinate Less? Unveiling the Architectural Factors Behind Hallucination Robustness
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.30911