OmniHallu: Unified Hallucination Detection for Cross-Modal Comprehension and Generation in Multimodal Large Language Models

Jianjiang Yang, LI Peihang, Shanqing Xu, Mengchen Qian, Lu Zhang, Meng Luo


Abstract
While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress across diverse tasks, they suffer from hallucinations where generated outputs contradict or misrepresent input semantics. Existing research typically addresses hallucination detection within a single modality or task type, limiting generalizability. We introduce OmniHallu, a unified hallucination detection framework spanning both comprehension and generation tasks across image, video, and audio modalities. We contribute OmniHallu-Bench, a 10,000-sample benchmark with claim-level human annotations covering six cross-modal tasks: image-to-text (I2T), video-to-text (V2T), audio-to-text (A2T), text-to-image (T2I), text-to-video (T2V), and text-to-audio (T2A). Our multi-agent architecture decomposes model outputs into atomic claims, verifies them through modality-specific experts, and aggregates evidence via structured reasoning. We further propose a preference-optimized trainable verifier that approximates the multi-agent decision boundary, reducing expert calls by 66% with minimal performance loss. Extensive experiments reveal a consistent modality-dependent performance gradient and provide fine-grained insights into cross-modal hallucination patterns.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-emnlp.644
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
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Pages:
13544–13555
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.644/
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Jianjiang Yang, LI Peihang, Shanqing Xu, Mengchen Qian, Lu Zhang, and Meng Luo. 2026. OmniHallu: Unified Hallucination Detection for Cross-Modal Comprehension and Generation in Multimodal Large Language Models. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 13544–13555, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
OmniHallu: Unified Hallucination Detection for Cross-Modal Comprehension and Generation in Multimodal Large Language Models (Yang et al., Findings 2026)
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https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.644.pdf