# Visual Hallucinations of Multi-modal Large Language Models

Source: [Visual Hallucinations of Multi-modal Large Language Models](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa73b21e209131cea5df48>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2026-01-04T04:40:28.907Z

Authors: Wen Huang, Hongbin Liu, Minxin Guo, Neil Zhenqiang Gong

Published: 2024-02-22T16:40:33.000Z

## Abstract

Visual hallucination (VH) means that a multi-modal LLM (MLLM) imagines incorrect details about an image in visual question answering. Existing studies find VH instances only in existing image datasets, which results in biased understanding of MLLMs' performance under VH due to limited diversity of such VH instances. In this work, we propose a tool called VHTest to generate a diverse set of VH instances. Specifically, VHTest finds some initial VH instances in existing image datasets (e.g., COCO), generates a text description for each VH mode, and uses a text-to-image generative model (e.g., DALL-E-3) to generate VH images based on the text descriptions. We collect a benchmark dataset with 1,200 VH instances in 8 VH modes using VHTest. We find that existing MLLMs such as GPT-4V, LLaVA-1.5, and MiniGPT-v2 hallucinate for a large fraction of the instances in our benchmark. Moreover, we find that fine-tuning an MLLM using our benchmark dataset reduces its likelihood to hallucinate without sacrificing its performance on other benchmarks. Our benchmarks are publicly available: https://github.com/wenhuang2000/VHTest.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.14683>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.14683.pdf>)

[Implementation](<https://github.com/wenhuang2000/VHTest>)
