Title: Counting Hallucinations in Diffusion Models
Primary area: generative models
Keywords: Generative models; diffusion models; counting hallucination; image generation

Abstract: Diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) have demonstrated remarkable progress in generative tasks, such as image and video synthesis. However, they still often produce hallucinated samples (_hallucinations_) that conflict with real-world knowledge, such as generating an implausible duplicate cup floating beside another cup.
Despite their prevalence, the lack of feasible methodologies for systematically quantifying such hallucinations hinders progress in addressing this challenge and obscures potential pathways for designing next-generation generative models under factual constraints.
In this work, we bridge this gap by focusing on a specific form of hallucination, which we term **counting hallucination**, referring to the generation of an incorrect number of instances or structured objects, such as a hand image with six fingers, despite such patterns being absent from the training data.
To this end, we construct a dataset suite **CountHalluSet**, with well-defined counting criteria, comprising ToyShape, SimObject, and RealHand.
Using these datasets, we develop a standardized evaluation protocol for quantifying counting hallucinations, and systematically examine how different sampling conditions in DPMs, including solver type, ODE solver order, sampling steps, and initial noise, affect counting hallucination levels. 
Furthermore, we analyze their correlation with common evaluation metrics such as Fréchet Inception Distance (FID), revealing this widely used image quality metric fail to capture counting hallucinations consistently.
This work aims to take the first step toward systematically quantifying hallucinations in diffusion models and offer new insights into the investigation of hallucination phenomena in image generation.