MLLM can see? Dynamic Correction Decoding for Hallucination Mitigation
Chenxi Wang, Xiang Chen, Ningyu Zhang, Bozhong Tian, Haoming Xu, Shumin Deng, Huajun Chen
Abstract
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) frequently exhibit hallucination phenomena, but the underlying reasons remain poorly understood. In this paper, we present an empirical analysis and find that, although MLLMs incorrectly generate the objects in the final output, they are actually able to recognize visual objects in the preceding layers. We speculate that this may be due to the strong knowledge priors of the language model suppressing the visual information, leading to hallucinations. Motivated by this, we propose a novel dynamic correction decoding method for MLLMs (DeCo), which adaptively selects the appropriate preceding layers and proportionally integrates knowledge into the final layer to adjust the output logits. Note that DeCo is model agnostic and can be seamlessly incorporated with various classic decoding strategies and applied to different MLLMs. We evaluate DeCo on widely-used benchmarks, demonstrating that it can reduce hallucination rates by a large margin compared to baselines, highlighting its potential to mitigate hallucinations 1 . "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself-and you are the easiest person to fool." -Richard Feynman * Equal Contribution.
Ask about this paper
Your agent reads all of it.
Lune indexed this paper to the last equation, along with the top-tier papers that cite it. Ask a question and the answer quotes them.
Cited by top-tier papers41
- Grounding Language with Vision: A Conditional Mutual Information Calibrated Decoding Strategy for Reducing Hallucinations in LVLMsHao Fang, Changle Zhou, Jiawei Kong, Kuofeng Gao et al.NeurIPS 2025 · 25 citations
- When Thinking Drifts: Evidential Grounding for Robust Video ReasoningRomy Luo, Zihui Xue, Alex Dimakis, Kristen GraumanNeurIPS 2025 · 21 citations
- When Semantics Mislead Vision: Mitigating Large Multimodal Models Hallucinations in Scene Text Spotting and UnderstandingYan Shu, Hangui Lin, Yexin Liu, Yan Zhang et al.NeurIPS 2025 · 17 citations
- Visual Multi-Agent System: Mitigating Hallucination Snowballing via Visual FlowXinlei Yu, Chengming Xu, Guibin Zhang, Yongbo He et al.ICLR 2026 · 15 citations
- See&Trek: Training-Free Spatial Prompting for Multimodal Large Language ModelPengteng Li, Pinhao Song, Wuyang Li, Huizai Yao et al.NeurIPS 2025 · 13 citations
Builds on22
- InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction TuningWenliang Dai, Junnan Li, Dongxu Li, Anthony Meng Huat Tiong et al.NeurIPS 2023 · 4,013 citations
- Ferret: Refer and Ground Anything Anywhere at Any GranularityHaoxuan You, Haotian Zhang, Zhe Gan, Xianzhi Du et al.ICLR 2024 · 515 citations
- Confident Adaptive Language ModelingTal Schuster, Adam Fisch, Jai Gupta, Mostafa Dehghani et al.NeurIPS 2022 · 394 citations
- DoLa: Decoding by Contrasting Layers Improves Factuality in Large Language ModelsYung-Sung Chuang, Yujia Xie, Hongyin Luo, Yoon Kim et al.ICLR 2024 · 354 citations
- Evaluating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language ModelsYifan Li, Yifan Du, Kun Zhou, Jinpeng Wang et al.EMNLP 2023 · 344 citations
Related papers
- DOPRA: Decoding Over-accumulation Penalization and Re-allocation in Specific Weighting LayerJinfeng Wei, Xiaofeng ZhangACM MM 2024 · 25 citations
- Residual Decoding: Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models via History-Aware Residual GuidanceXinrong Chen, Xu Chu, Yingmin Qiu, Hengyuan Zhang et al.CVPR 2026 · 8 citations
- DAMO: Decoding by Accumulating Activations Momentum for Mitigating Hallucinations in Vision-Language ModelsKaishen Wang, Hengrui Gu, Meijun Gao, Kaixiong ZhouICLR 2025
- Decoupling Contrastive Decoding: Robust Hallucination Mitigation in Multimodal Large Language ModelsWei Chen, Xin Yan, Bin Wen, Fan Yang et al.NeurIPS 2025 · 4 citations
- From Pixels to Tokens: Revisiting Object Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language ModelsYuying Shang, Xinyi Zeng, Yutao Zhu, Xiao Yang et al.ACM MM 2025 · 5 citations
