通过检索证据与可信度评估,减少多模态模型的视觉幻觉错误。
Mitigating Visual Hallucinations in Multimodal Systems through Retrieval-Augmented Reliability-Aware Inference

- 构建外部视觉证据库,用相似性匹配判断预测可信度。
- 在ImageNet-100上将正确预测率提升至88.88%,幻觉错误下降至11.12%。
- 无需重训练模型,适合部署于高可靠性要求的视觉问答系统。
多模态大语言模型虽具备强大的视觉-语言理解能力,但在视觉证据弱或不一致时仍会产生过度自信的幻觉输出。现有方法多关注模态对齐或检索增强生成,缺乏对个体预测可信度的量化机制。本文提出一种检索增强的可靠性感知推理框架:利用预训练视觉嵌入构建外部证据库,通过最近邻检索获取视觉证据,并基于相似度强度、类别支持一致性、证据间距、熵不确定性等指标计算综合可信度得分。系统根据该得分决定接受预测、谨慎回应或放弃回答。在ImageNet-100上的实验表明,该框架使接受预测的准确率从85.84%提升至88.88%,覆盖率达89.04%,幻觉类误判率由14.16%降至11.12%。结果证明,结合检索证据、可信度估计与选择性决策门控,可在不重训练模型的前提下提升校准性并减少过自信的视觉错误。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in vision-language understanding and natural-language response generation. However, these systems can still produce overconfident predictions and hallucination-like outputs, particularly when the visual evidence is weak, ambiguous, or semantically inconsistent. Most existing approaches focus on improving multimodal representation alignment or retrieval-augmented generation, while providing limited mechanisms to quantify instance-level prediction reliability or identify incorrect visual outputs. This work proposes a retrieval-augmented reliability-aware inference framework for trustworthy multimodal visual understanding. The proposed framework constructs an external visual evidence database using pretrained visual embeddings and nearest-neighbor retrieval over normalized feature representations. Retrieved evidence is used to estimate prediction trustworthiness through multiple reliability indicators, including similarity strength, class-support agreement, evidence margin, entropy-based uncertainty, and an aggregate reliability score. Based on these signals, a decision gate determines whether the system should accept the prediction, answer with caution, or abstain/fallback when evidence is insufficient. A multimodal response-generation layer then produces a final user-facing response conditioned on the reliability decision. Experiments on ImageNet-100 demonstrate that the proposed reliability-aware framework improves accepted prediction accuracy from 85.84\% to 88.88\% at 89.04\% coverage. The hallucination-like accepted wrong-answer rate is reduced from 14.16\% to 11.12\%. These results show that integrating retrieval evidence, reliability estimation, and selective decision gating can improve calibration and reduce overconfident visual errors without retraining large multimodal models.
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