arXiv · 2503.07772
Hallucinatory Image Tokens: A Training-free EAZY Approach on Detecting and Mitigating Object Hallucinations in LVLMs
Abstract
Despite their remarkable potential, Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) still face challenges with object hallucination, a problem where their generated outputs mistakenly incorporate objects that do not actually exist. Although most works focus on addressing this issue within the language-model backbone, our work shifts the focus to the image input source, investigating how specific image tokens contribute to hallucinations. Our analysis reveals a striking finding: a small subset of image tokens with high attention scores are the primary drivers of object hallucination. By removing these hallucinatory image tokens (only 1.5% of all image tokens), the issue can be effectively mitigated. This finding holds consistently across different models and datasets. Building on this insight, we introduce EAZY, a novel, training-free method that automatically identifies and Eliminates hAllucinations by Zeroing out hallucinatorY image tokens. We utilize EAZY for unsupervised object hallucination detection, achieving 15% improvement compared to previous methods. Additionally, EAZY demonstrates remarkable effectiveness in mitigating hallucinations while preserving model utility and seamlessly adapting to various LVLM architectures.
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Liwei Che, Tony Qingze Liu, Jing Jia, Weiyi Qin, Ruixiang Tang, Vladimir Pavlovic. 2025-03-10. Hallucinatory Image Tokens: A Training-free EAZY Approach on Detecting and Mitigating Object Hallucinations in LVLMs. https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.07772
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