Multi-Modal Hallucination Control by Visual Information Grounding
Authors: Alessandro Favero, Luca Zancato, Matthew Trager, Siddharth Choudhary, Pramuditha Perera, Alessandro Achille, Ashwin Swaminathan, Stefano Soatto

Generative Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are prone to generate plausible-sounding textual answers which however are not always grounded in the input image. We investigate this phenomenon usually referred to as "hallucination" and show that it stems from an excessive reliance on the language prior. In particular we show that as more tokens are generated the reliance on the visual prompt decreases and this behavior strongly correlates with the emergence of hallucinations. To reduce hallucinations we introduce Multi-Modal Mutual-Information Decoding (M3ID) a new sampling method for prompt amplification. M3ID amplifies the influence of the reference image over the language prior hence favoring the generation of tokens with higher mutual information with the visual prompt. M3ID can be applied to any pre-trained autoregressive VLM at inference time without necessitating further training and with minimal computational overhead. If training is an option we show that M3ID can be paired with Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to improve the model's reliance on the prompt image without requiring any labels. Our empirical findings show that our algorithms maintain the fluency and linguistic capabilities of pre-trained VLMs while reducing hallucinations by mitigating visually ungrounded answers. Specifically for the LLaVA 13B model M3ID and M3ID+DPO reduce the percentage of hallucinated objects in captioning tasks by 25% and 28% respectively and improve the accuracy on VQA benchmarks such as POPE by 21% and 24%.