JinHyeong Kim
Author directory2026
LookBack: Where and How to Score LVLM Responses via Visual Reference Usage
Beomsik Cho | JinHyeong Kim | Dongseok Lee | Jaehyung Kim
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Beomsik Cho | JinHyeong Kim | Dongseok Lee | Jaehyung Kim
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) integrate visual perception with language generation, enabling responses that span image understanding and complex reasoning. However, LVLMs do not just inherit the text-level hallucinations; they also hallucinate against the image, producing fluent responses ungrounded in what they see. This makes LVLM response scoring inherently harder, and our diagnostics show that existing confidence-based metrics adopted from LLMs is insufficient for LVLMs. Specifically, removing the input image barely changes confidence-based selection, suggesting that output-space confidence primarily captures textual plausibility rather than agreement with the image. To address this gap, we propose LookBack, a training-free LVLM response scoring method that augments token likelihood with visual lookback score, a lightweight measure of how strongly each response token refers to image tokens. Across four benchmarks and three models, LookBack consistently improves Best-of- selection over existing baselines with negligible additional overhead.