Vision-driven Preference Synthesis for Mitigating Hallucinations in VLMs
Authors: Yunhun Nam, Jongheon Jeong
Organizations: Korea University
Abstract
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown strong performance in visual understanding, yet they still suffer from hallucinations, generating content that is not grounded in the image. Preference alignment is a promising approach to improve visual faithfulness, but its success depends heavily on how preference pairs are constructed. Existing methods exhibit two key limitations; (a) intervention-based methods often introduce significant deviation from the policy distribution, and (b) sampling-based methods often underuse visual information during the construction. In this paper, we propose ViPSy (Vision-driven Preference Synthesis), a framework for constructing preference data that are both policy-aligned and visually grounded. Our framework consists of two stages; in the first stage, ViPSy derives a visual cue from recurring object-level content across semantically aligned image variants, so preference construction can rely on visual information rather than language priors. In the second stage, ViPSy conditions the policy's own rollouts on this cue, allowing candidates to be guided by visually grounded content while staying close to the policy's response distribution. The resulting candidates remain close to the policy's response distribution while better leveraging visual information from the image. Experiments show that the resulting VLM, preference-aligned with ViPSy-constructed preference pairs, achieves a new state-of-the-art in hallucination mitigation. Compared with the previous state-of-the-art method, it reduces hallucination rates on AMBER and Object HalBench by 35.7% and 24.5%, respectively. The resulting model further improves on general visual grounding benchmarks, e.g., MMStar, MMVP, and CV-Bench, while also yielding gains in semantic segmentation and ImageNet linear probing, underscoring the effectiveness of our framework in enhancing the model's visual capabilities.
Despite impressive progress in capabilities of large vision-language models (LVLMs), these systems remain vulnerable to hallucinations, i.e., outputs that are not grounded in the visual input. Prior work has attributed hallucinations in LVLMs to factors such as limitations of the vision backbone or the dominance of the language component, yet the relative importance of these factors remains unclear. To resolve this ambiguity, We propose HalluScope, a benchmark to better understand the extent to which different factors induce hallucinations. Our analysis indicates that hallucinations largely stem from excessive reliance on textual priors and background knowledge, especially information introduced through textual instructions. To mitigate hallucinations induced by textual instruction priors, we propose HalluVL-DPO, a framework for fine-tuning off-the-shelf LVLMs towards more visually grounded responses. HalluVL-DPO leverages preference optimization using a curated training dataset that we construct, guiding the model to prefer grounded responses over hallucinated ones. We demonstrate that our optimized model effectively mitigates the targeted hallucination failure mode, while preserving or improving performance on other hallucination benchmarks and visual capability evaluations. To support reproducibility and further research, we will publicly release our evaluation benchmark, preference training dataset, and code at https://pegah-kh.github.io/projects/prompts-override-vision/ .
Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in multimodal understanding. However, they remain prone to hallucinations, generating responses that are inconsistent with the visual evidence. Existing mitigation methods largely address language-prior bias or cross-modal imbalance, while progressive visual degradation across perception and memory remains underexplored. In this work, we propose Saliency-Driven Perceptual Realignment (SDPR), a training-free framework that mitigates the degradation of visual awareness throughout inference. Specifically, we first introduce saliency-driven attention redistribution to release attention hijacked by non-semantic sink tokens, thereby recovering critical visual evidence. Second, we identify spatial distortion in the KV cache and propose saliency-driven cache alignment to preserve query-relevant visual features during generation. Finally, we introduce prior-constrained contrastive decoding to penalize unfaithful predictions induced by dominant language priors. Our proposed SDPR is robust against hallucinations due to its holistic alignment of visual awareness across the entire generative trajectory. Extensive experiments across diverse LVLM architectures show that SDPR outperforms state-of-the-art methods on both hallucination and general-purpose benchmarks, requiring no additional training and incurring minimal runtime overhead. The code is available \href{https://github.com/PengSyuChen/SDPR}{\color{blue}{here}}.
Hallucination remains a fundamental challenge in vision-language models (VLMs), where autoregressive generation may produce linguistically plausible yet physically inconsistent or visually ungrounded responses due to likelihood maximization under joint probabilistic modeling. We propose a stage-wise preference optimization framework for hallucination reduction through targeted multimodal data construction. Rather than directly optimizing on generic instruction-following data, our approach progressively constructs hallucination-focused preference pairs near known failure boundaries. The framework emphasizes ambiguous spatial orientation, object relationships, OCR uncertainty, and adversarial false-premise training. Hallucinated negatives are generated through minimally perturbed yet visually inconsistent alternatives, enabling Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to better separate grounded reasoning from plausible hallucination. Experiments on open-source benchmarks and real-world multimodal evaluation scenarios demonstrate improved grounding consistency, reduced hallucination, and more informative grounded responses. Cross-model qualitative evaluation further shows that the proposed multimodal LLM DPO framework produces more visually grounded responses than several frontier proprietary VLMs, such as in ambiguous spatial reasoning and adversarial false-premise settings. The results suggest that hallucination may arise not only from limited model capacity, but also from inherent tendencies of autoregressive probabilistic generation to favor linguistically plausible continuations under weak visual grounding. Future work may explore physical consistency modeling, uncertainty-aware multimodal reasoning, and architectural alternatives beyond standard autoregressive decoding.