VLMs default to visual grounding but a sparse circuit of 2.5-4.8% attention heads in later layers mediates prior-knowledge overrides, identified causally via patching and ablation across three model families.
Interpreting and editing vision-language representations to mitigate hallucinations, 2025a
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abstract
We investigate the internal representations of vision-language models (VLMs) to address hallucinations, a persistent challenge despite advances in model size and training. We project VLMs' internal image representations to their language vocabulary and observe more confident output probabilities on real objects than hallucinated objects. We additionally use these output probabilities to spatially localize real objects. Building on this approach, we introduce a knowledge erasure algorithm that removes hallucinations by linearly orthogonalizing image features with respect to hallucinated object features. We show that targeted edits to a model's latent representations can reduce hallucinations by up to 25.7% on the COCO2014 dataset while preserving performance. Our findings demonstrate how a deeper understanding of VLMs' latent representations can enhance reliability and enable novel capabilities, such as zero-shot segmentation.
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A lightweight Q-Former proxy trained on VLM hidden states reveals that localization signals peak in input-dependent intermediate layers, not the final layers used by standard editing pipelines.
Decoder-side Temporal Rebalancing (DTR) reduces hallucinations in Video-LLMs by mitigating over-dominance of a single anchor frame during inference without training or auxiliary models.
The survey organizes mechanistic interpretability techniques into a Locate-Steer-Improve framework to enable actionable improvements in LLM alignment, capability, and efficiency.
The survey organizes causes of hallucinations in MLLMs, reviews evaluation benchmarks and metrics, and outlines mitigation approaches plus open questions.
citing papers explorer
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Vision-Default, Prior-Override: Causal Mechanisms of Perception-Knowledge Conflict in Vision-Language Models
VLMs default to visual grounding but a sparse circuit of 2.5-4.8% attention heads in later layers mediates prior-knowledge overrides, identified causally via patching and ablation across three model families.
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Analysis-by-Proxy: Localization Signals in VLMs Operating as Condition Encoders
A lightweight Q-Former proxy trained on VLM hidden states reveals that localization signals peak in input-dependent intermediate layers, not the final layers used by standard editing pipelines.
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Relaxing Anchor-Frame Dominance for Mitigating Hallucinations in Video Large Language Models
Decoder-side Temporal Rebalancing (DTR) reduces hallucinations in Video-LLMs by mitigating over-dominance of a single anchor frame during inference without training or auxiliary models.
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Locate, Steer, and Improve: A Practical Survey of Actionable Mechanistic Interpretability in Large Language Models
The survey organizes mechanistic interpretability techniques into a Locate-Steer-Improve framework to enable actionable improvements in LLM alignment, capability, and efficiency.
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Hallucination of Multimodal Large Language Models: A Survey
The survey organizes causes of hallucinations in MLLMs, reviews evaluation benchmarks and metrics, and outlines mitigation approaches plus open questions.
- The Hidden Evolution of Disguised Visual Context inside the VLM