PerturboLLaVA: Reducing Multimodal Hallucinations with Perturbative Visual Training

This paper aims to address the challenge of hallucinations in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) particularly for dense image captioning tasks. To address the challenge, we identify the current lack of a metric that finely measures the quality of the caption at the concept level. We hereby introduce HalFscore, a novel metric built upon the language graph that is designed to evaluate both the accuracy and completeness of dense captions at a granular level. Additionally, we identify the root cause of hallucination as the model's over-reliance on its language prior. To address this, we propose PerturboLLaVA, which reduces the model's reliance on the language prior by incorporating adversarially perturbed text during training. This method enhances the model's focus on visual inputs, effectively reducing hallucinations and producing accurate, image-grounded descriptions without incurring additional computational overhead. PerturboLLaVA significantly improves the fidelity of generated captions, outperforming existing approaches in handling multimodal hallucinations and achieving improved performance across general multimodal benchmarks.