Title: HalluText: Towards Benchmarking and Mitigating OCR Hallucination for LVLMs
Primary area: applications to computer vision, audio, language, and other modalities
Keywords: OCR, Hallucination, Large Vision Language Model

Abstract: Optical Character Recognition (OCR) serves as a critical bridge connecting vision and language, attracting increasing attention in the community of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). However, due to the prevalent encode-then-decode architecture, LVLMs tend to over-rely on language priors, leading to frequent failures in following basic visual-text instructions. We term this issue OCR hallucination. 
To systematically mitigate it and facilitate reliable OCR perception in LVLMs, we conduct the first large-scale empirical analysis based on OCRBench v2. Our findings reveal that current LVLMs frequently misinterpret or ignore textual visual content, particularly across two orthogonal dimensions, including perception task and hallucination taxonomy. Building on these insights, we introduce HalluText, a benchmark specifically designed to comprehensively evaluate OCR hallucination in LVLMs across nine subclasses. Alongside this benchmark, we propose OCRAssistor, a lightweight plug-and-play method pioneering large-small model collaboration. By integrating compact OCR model outputs into the LVLM decoding process, it achieves a 9.6\% improvement on HalluText with only marginal computational cost. When applied to OCRBench v2, this method also improves the performance of the top-performing open-source model Qwen2.5-VL-7B, achieving a 3\% gain and highlighting the importance of addressing OCR hallucination in LVLMs. Through our benchmark and proposed solution, we hope to shed light on the challenges and potential pathways for improving visual text perception in LVLMs. The organized benchmark and the relevant code will be released soon.