A Comprehensive Analysis for Visual Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models

Liqiang Jing, Hardy Chen, Ehsan Aghazadeh, Xin Eric Wang, Xinya Du


Abstract
Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities in multimodal tasks, but visual object hallucination remains a persistent issue. It refers to scenarios where models generate inaccurate visual object-related information based on the query input, potentially leading to misinformation and concerns about safety and reliability. Previous works focus on the evaluation and mitigation of visual hallucinations, but the underlying causes have not been comprehensively investigated. In this paper, we analyze each component of LLaVA-like LVLMs—the large language model, the vision backbone, and the projector, to identify potential sources of error and their impact. Based on our observations, we propose methods to mitigate hallucination for each problematic component. Additionally, we developed two hallucination benchmarks: QA-VisualGenome, which emphasizes attribute and relation hallucinations, and QA-FB15k, which focuses on cognition-based hallucinations.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-emnlp.115
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2365–2378
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.115/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Liqiang Jing, Hardy Chen, Ehsan Aghazadeh, Xin Eric Wang, and Xinya Du. 2026. A Comprehensive Analysis for Visual Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 2365–2378, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Comprehensive Analysis for Visual Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models (Jing et al., Findings 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.115.pdf