Less is More: Mitigating Multimodal Hallucination from an EOS Decision Perspective

Zihao Yue, Liang Zhang, Qin Jin


Abstract
Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) often suffer from multimodal hallucinations, wherein they may create content that is not present in the visual inputs. In this paper, we explore a new angle of this issue: overly detailed training data hinders the model’s ability to timely terminate generation, leading to continued outputs beyond visual perception limits. By investigating how the model decides to terminate generation with EOS, the special end-of-sentence token, we find that the model assesses the completeness of the entire sequence by comparing the generated text with the image. This observation suggests that the model possesses an inherent potential of making proper EOS decisions based on its visual perception to avoid overly lengthy outputs. To take advantage of such potential, we explore two methods to mitigate multimodal hallucinations: a training objective that enables the model to reduce hallucinations by learning from regular instruction data, and a data filtering strategy to prevent harmful training data from exacerbating model hallucinations. Both methods significantly improve the hallucination performance of LMMs, without requiring any additional data or knowledge.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.633
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
11766–11781
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.633
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zihao Yue, Liang Zhang, and Qin Jin. 2024. Less is More: Mitigating Multimodal Hallucination from an EOS Decision Perspective. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 11766–11781, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Less is More: Mitigating Multimodal Hallucination from an EOS Decision Perspective (Yue et al., ACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.633.pdf