从心理学视角解析视觉语言模型幻觉,发现三类认知偏差。
Investigating VLM Hallucination from a Cognitive Psychology Perspective: A First Step Toward Interpretation with Intriguing Observations
- 构建心理分类框架,识别模型三类认知偏差
- 大模型更顺从用户但更易盲信权威
- 提出可扩展基准AIpsych,适合模型评估研究者
幻觉是视觉语言模型(VLMs)长期存在的问题。现有研究多归因于技术局限或迎合偏差(即模型为迎合用户预期而生成错误答案)。本文提出一种心理学分类体系,将导致幻觉的认知偏差分为迎合、逻辑不一致及新发现的'诉诸权威'行为。为此设计了可扩展的基准AIpsych,系统分析模型架构与参数规模对响应模式的影响。实验表明:随着模型规模增大,迎合倾向增强但权威偏差减弱,反映出模型能力提升的同时响应完整性下降。人类对照实验验证了上述假设,并揭示模型与人类在行为上的关键差异。本工作为理解VLM幻觉提供了新视角,强调将心理学原则融入模型评估的重要性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Hallucination is a long-standing problem that has been actively investigated in Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Existing research commonly attributes hallucinations to technical limitations or sycophancy bias, where the latter means the models tend to generate incorrect answers to align with user expectations. However, these explanations primarily focus on technical or externally driven factors, and may have neglected the possibility that hallucination behaviours might mirror cognitive biases observed in human psychology. In this work, we introduce a psychological taxonomy, categorizing VLMs' cognitive biases that lead to hallucinations, including sycophancy, logical inconsistency, and a newly identified VLMs behaviour: appeal to authority. To systematically analyze these behaviours, we design AIpsych, a scalable benchmark that reveals psychological tendencies in model response patterns. Leveraging this benchmark, we investigate how variations in model architecture and parameter size influence model behaviour when responding to strategically manipulated questions. Our experiments reveal that as model size increases, VLMs exhibit stronger sycophantic tendencies but reduced authority bias, suggesting increasing competence but a potential erosion of response integrity. A human subject study further validates our hypotheses and highlights key behavioural differences between VLMs and human respondents. This work suggests a new perspective for understanding hallucination in VLMs and highlights the importance of integrating psychological principles into model evaluation.
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