arXiv:2605.19250cs.AI2026-05

发现视觉模型生成错误因注意力头失衡,提出干预方法减少幻觉。

Causal Evidence for Attention Head Imbalance in Modality Conflict Hallucination

论文配图:Causal Evidence for Attention Head Imbalance in Modality Conflict Hallucination
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 通过路径修补分析注意力头因果角色,发现驱动与抵抗幻觉的两类头。
  • 驱动头分布广、权重高,抵抗头集中且重要,形成生成偏误的不平衡结构。
  • 提出MACI干预法,仅在模态冲突时抑制驱动头,效果优于现有方法。

多模态大语言模型在生成时经常优先错误文本而非矛盾视觉证据,产生模态冲突幻觉。本文从机制角度分析内部组件的作用,通过对五种开源多模态大模型进行头级因果分析(路径修补),识别出两类具有相反因果作用的注意力头:诱发幻觉的头和抵抗幻觉的头。研究发现,诱发效应分布更广、总权重更大,而抵抗效应集中于少数高重要性头。消融实验证实二者在生成中起相反作用,分布式驱动与局部抵抗共同构成失衡路由结构,导致生成偏向错误前提。基于此,提出条件性干预方法MACI(Modality-conflict-Aware Causal Intervention),仅在检测到模态冲突时抑制已识别的幻觉驱动头。在五个模型上,MACI在MMMC基准上实现最大幻觉降低,且保持良好准确率权衡,并在SCI-SemanticConflict测试中实现零样本迁移。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Modality-conflict hallucination occurs when multimodal large language models (MLLMs) prioritize erroneous textual premises over contradictory visual evidence. To understand why visual evidence fails to prevail during generation, we take a mechanistic perspective and examine which internal components drive or resist this failure. We perform head-level causal analysis using path patching across five open-source MLLMs and identify two groups of attention heads with opposing causal roles: hallucination-driving heads and hallucination-resisting heads. We find a consistent asymmetry: driving effects are more broadly distributed and carry greater aggregate weight, whereas resisting effects concentrate in a small number of high-importance heads. Ablation experiments further confirm that these groups exert opposing effects during generation: distributed driving influence and localized resistance together form an imbalanced routing structure that biases generation toward the erroneous premise. Motivated by this finding, we propose MACI (Modality-conflict-Aware Causal Intervention), a conditional intervention that suppresses causally identified hallucination-driving heads only when conflict is detected. Across five MLLMs, MACI achieves the largest hallucination reduction among compared inference-time baselines on the MMMC benchmark with a favorable hallucination-accuracy trade-off, and transfers zero-shot to the SCI-SemanticConflict test.

多模态幻觉缓解注意力头因果干预

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