DiVE: Decoupling Intra-layer Visual Evidence for Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models

Xinwei Li, Li Lin, Hui Jiao, Li Yao, Tien-Tsin Wong, Hanqian Wu


Abstract
Recent Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have achieved significant progress yet frequently suffer from visual hallucinations, often stemming from an over-reliance on language priors rather than visual evidence. Existing decoding-based approaches often rely on input perturbations to weaken language priors, but they do not explicitly decouple visual evidence from mixed vision–language representations. To address these limitations, we propose DiVE (Decoupling intra-layer Visual Evidence). DiVE dynamically identifies layers enriched with visual information and performs intra-layer decoupling to extract aggregated visual evidence. By suppressing this evidence to construct a language-prior-dominated reference distribution, DiVE employs contrastive decoding to calibrate the output logits, thereby mitigating hallucinations. Extensive experiments across diverse LVLM architectures demonstrate that DiVE achieves state-of-the-art performance among decoding-based methods on multiple benchmarks. Crucially, it eliminates the latency of an extra forward pass, offering a lightweight and efficient solution.
Anthology ID:
2026.acl-long.1742
Volume:
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
37552–37568
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1742/
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Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xinwei Li, Li Lin, Hui Jiao, Li Yao, Tien-Tsin Wong, and Hanqian Wu. 2026. DiVE: Decoupling Intra-layer Visual Evidence for Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 37552–37568, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
DiVE: Decoupling Intra-layer Visual Evidence for Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models (Li et al., ACL 2026)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1742.pdf
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