Research Area:  Machine Learning

Abstract:

Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have been shown to efficiently integrate natural language with visual information to handle multi-modal tasks. However, MLLMs still face a fundamental limitation of hallucinations, where they tend to generate erroneous or fabricated information. In this paper, we address hallucinations in MLLMs from a novel perspective of representation learning. We first analyzed the representation distribution of textual and visual tokens in MLLM, revealing two important findings: 1) there is a significant gap between textual and visual representations, indicating unsatisfactory cross-modal representation alignment; 2) representations of texts that contain and do not contain hallucinations are entangled, making it challenging to distinguish them. These two observations inspire us with a simple yet effective method to mitigate hallucinations. Specifically, we introduce contrastive learning into MLLMs and use text with hallucination as hard negative examples, naturally bringing representations of non-hallucinative text and visual samples closer while pushing way representations of non-hallucinating and hallucinative text. We evaluate our method quantitatively and qualitatively, showing its effectiveness in reducing hallucination occurrences and improving performance across multiple benchmarks.

Keywords:  

Author(s) Name:  Chaoya Jiang, Haiyang Xu, Mengfan Dong, Jiaxing Chen, Wei Ye, Ming Yan, Qinghao Ye, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Shikun Zhang

Publisher name:  arXiv

DOI:  10.48550/arXiv.2312.06968

Volume Information:  volume 83,(2024)

Paper Link:   https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.06968