Shunqi Mao
2026
Through the Magnifying Glass: Adaptive Perception Magnification for Hallucination-Free VLM Decoding
Shunqi Mao | Chaoyi Zhang | Weidong Cai
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Shunqi Mao | Chaoyi Zhang | Weidong Cai
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Existing vision-language models (VLMs) often suffer from visual hallucination, where the generated responses contain inaccuracies that are not grounded in the visual input. Efforts to address this issue without model finetuning primarily mitigate hallucination by contrastively reducing language biases or amplifying the weights of visual embedding during decoding. However, these approaches remain limited in their ability to capture fine-grained visual details. In this work, we propose the Perception Magnifier (PM), a novel visual decoding method that iteratively isolates relevant visual tokens based on attention and magnifies the corresponding regions, spurring the model to concentrate on fine-grained visual details during decoding. By magnifying critical regions while preserving the structural and contextual information at each decoding step, PM allows the VLM to enhance its scrutiny of the visual input, hence producing more accurate and faithful responses. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that PM not only achieves superior hallucination mitigation but also enhances language generation while preserving strong reasoning capabilities.