Jiaxuan Cao
Author directory2026
Correlation-Flip Visual Injection for Hallucination Mitigation in Large Vision-Language Models
Jiaxuan Cao | Zeyu Shi | Longhua Li | Lei Wang | Lei Qi
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Jiaxuan Cao | Zeyu Shi | Longhua Li | Lei Wang | Lei Qi
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Large vision-language models (LVLMs) often hallucinate due to over-reliance on language priors. Existing methods implicitly assume that visual tokens maintain consistent semantics across layers and thus indiscriminately inject shallow-layer visual information into deeper layers. We identify a new phenomenon, termed correlation flip, where a visual token positively correlated with the decoding context in an intermediate layer becomes negatively correlated in the final layer, indicating that correct visual evidence is suppressed before prediction. Based on this finding, we propose Correlation-Flip Visual Injection (CFVI), a simple and training-free decoding-time method that selectively identifies correlation-flip tokens and injects corrective visual signals into the final-layer hidden state to restore suppressed evidence and mitigate hallucinations. CFVI can be directly applied to existing LVLMs, and introduces minimal computational overhead. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that CFVI achieves strong performance while preserving language fluency.