Milim Kim


2025

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Watermarking for Factuality: Guiding Vision-Language Models Toward Truth via Tri-layer Contrastive Decoding
Kyungryul Back | Seongbeom Park | Milim Kim | Mincheol Kwon | SangHyeok Lee | Hyunyoung Lee | Junhee Cho | Seunghyun Park | Jinkyu Kim
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have recently shown promising results on various multimodal tasks, even achieving human-comparable performance in certain cases. Nevertheless, LVLMs remain prone to hallucinations–they often rely heavily on a single modality or memorize training data without properly grounding their outputs. To address this, we propose a training-free, tri-layer contrastive decoding with watermarking, which proceeds in three steps: (1) select a mature layer and an amateur layer among the decoding layers, (2) identify a pivot layer using a watermark-related question to assess whether the layer is visually well-grounded, and (3) apply tri-layer contrastive decoding to generate the final output. Experiments on public benchmarks such as POPE, MME and AMBER demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in reducing hallucinations in LVLMs and generates more visually grounded responses.