Mitigating Object Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models via Attention Calibration (2502.01969v1)

Abstract: Large Vision-LLMs (LVLMs) exhibit impressive multimodal reasoning capabilities but remain highly susceptible to object hallucination, where models generate responses that are not factually aligned with the visual content. Recent works attribute this issue to an inherent bias of LVLMs where vision token attention map has a fixed correlation with spatial position, and propose to mitigate this issue by reordering visual tokens. However, we find that different LVLMs exhibit different correlations between attention and spatial position, which makes the existing solution difficult to generalize to other LVLMs. To address this issue, we first introduce a training-free solution, Uniform Attention Calibration (UAC), that estimates the bias from single meaningless input image and applies a calibration matrix to rectify attention imbalances. To further alleviate the bias, we relax the assumption of single meaningless input in UAC and introduce a fine-tuning solution, Dynamic Attention Calibration (DAC), that enforces the consistent outputs wherever the object locates in the image via a plug-and-plays module. Comprehensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that UAC and DAC significantly reduce object hallucination while improving general multimodal alignment. Our methods achieve state-of-the-art performance across diverse LVLM architectures on various metrics.