@inproceedings{cai-etal-2025-mhalo,
title = "{MHALO}: Evaluating {MLLM}s as Fine-grained Hallucination Detectors",
author = "Cai, Yishuo and
Gu, Renjie and
Li, Jiaxu and
Huang, Xuancheng and
Chen, Junzhe and
Gu, Xiaotao and
Huang, Minlie",
editor = "Che, Wanxiang and
Nabende, Joyce and
Shutova, Ekaterina and
Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025",
month = jul,
year = "2025",
address = "Vienna, Austria",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-acl.478/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.findings-acl.478",
pages = "9197--9222",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-256-5",
abstract = "Hallucination remains a critical challenge for multimodal large language models (MLLMs), undermining their reliability in real-world applications. While fine-grained hallucination detection (FHD) holds promise for enhancing high-quality vision-language data construction and model alignment through enriched feedback signals, automated solutions for this task have yet to be systematically explored. Inspired by the concept of ``MLLM as a Judge'', we introduce MHALO, the first comprehensive benchmark specifically designed for evaluating MLLMs' capability in performing token-level FHD. Our benchmark encompasses 12 distinct hallucination types spanning both multimodal perception and reasoning domains. Through extensive evaluations of 9 selected MLLMs, we reveal substantial performance limitations, with the leading model achieving an average $F1_{IoU}$ of only 40.59{\%}. To address this limitation, we develop HaloDet-4B, a specialized model trained on our curated training data, which significantly outperforms existing models. We hope the benchmark can provide valuable insights for future research on hallucination mitigation in MLLMs. The code and dataset will be publicly available."
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<abstract>Hallucination remains a critical challenge for multimodal large language models (MLLMs), undermining their reliability in real-world applications. While fine-grained hallucination detection (FHD) holds promise for enhancing high-quality vision-language data construction and model alignment through enriched feedback signals, automated solutions for this task have yet to be systematically explored. Inspired by the concept of “MLLM as a Judge”, we introduce MHALO, the first comprehensive benchmark specifically designed for evaluating MLLMs’ capability in performing token-level FHD. Our benchmark encompasses 12 distinct hallucination types spanning both multimodal perception and reasoning domains. Through extensive evaluations of 9 selected MLLMs, we reveal substantial performance limitations, with the leading model achieving an average F1_IoU of only 40.59%. To address this limitation, we develop HaloDet-4B, a specialized model trained on our curated training data, which significantly outperforms existing models. We hope the benchmark can provide valuable insights for future research on hallucination mitigation in MLLMs. The code and dataset will be publicly available.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T MHALO: Evaluating MLLMs as Fine-grained Hallucination Detectors
%A Cai, Yishuo
%A Gu, Renjie
%A Li, Jiaxu
%A Huang, Xuancheng
%A Chen, Junzhe
%A Gu, Xiaotao
%A Huang, Minlie
%Y Che, Wanxiang
%Y Nabende, Joyce
%Y Shutova, Ekaterina
%Y Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher
%S Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
%D 2025
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Vienna, Austria
%@ 979-8-89176-256-5
%F cai-etal-2025-mhalo
%X Hallucination remains a critical challenge for multimodal large language models (MLLMs), undermining their reliability in real-world applications. While fine-grained hallucination detection (FHD) holds promise for enhancing high-quality vision-language data construction and model alignment through enriched feedback signals, automated solutions for this task have yet to be systematically explored. Inspired by the concept of “MLLM as a Judge”, we introduce MHALO, the first comprehensive benchmark specifically designed for evaluating MLLMs’ capability in performing token-level FHD. Our benchmark encompasses 12 distinct hallucination types spanning both multimodal perception and reasoning domains. Through extensive evaluations of 9 selected MLLMs, we reveal substantial performance limitations, with the leading model achieving an average F1_IoU of only 40.59%. To address this limitation, we develop HaloDet-4B, a specialized model trained on our curated training data, which significantly outperforms existing models. We hope the benchmark can provide valuable insights for future research on hallucination mitigation in MLLMs. The code and dataset will be publicly available.
%R 10.18653/v1/2025.findings-acl.478
%U https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-acl.478/
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.findings-acl.478
%P 9197-9222
Markdown (Informal)
[MHALO: Evaluating MLLMs as Fine-grained Hallucination Detectors](https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-acl.478/) (Cai et al., Findings 2025)
ACL