Junjun Zheng
2026
Token-level Inference-Time Alignment for Vision-Language Models
Kejia Chen | Junjun Zheng | Jiawen Zhang | Manxi Lin | Xiao Pan | Jiacong Hu | Jian Lou | Zunlei Feng | Mingli Song
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Kejia Chen | Junjun Zheng | Jiawen Zhang | Manxi Lin | Xiao Pan | Jiacong Hu | Jian Lou | Zunlei Feng | Mingli Song
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) often prioritize linguistic fluency over visual fidelity, leading to hallucinations where generated text contradicts the image. Countering this bias typically requires resource-heavy fine-tuning or high-latency verification methods that provide feedback only after the full response is generated. To overcome these limitations, we present a framework for Token-level Inference-Time Alignment (TITA) that steers the decoding process without updating the base model parameters. By training a lightweight reward model to capture visual preferences, TITA extracts implicit guidance through log-probability ratios. This approach functions as an inference-time adaptation of Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), injecting dense feedback to correct the output distribution at every generation step. Across diverse architectures including LLaVA-1.5, Qwen3-VL, and InternVL3.5, TITA consistently improves performance on 13 benchmarks. For example, TITA boosts LLaVA-1.5-7B by 8.6% on MMVet and achieves a 74.0 MMStar score with Qwen3-VL-8B. Specifically, these gains incur negligible overhead (~0.2s per query), offering a superior trade-off between alignment effectiveness and efficiency. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Thecommonirin/TITA.