Multi-Frequency Contrastive Decoding: Alleviating Hallucinations for Large Vision-Language Models

Bingqian Liu, Fu Zhang, Guoqing Chen, Jingwei Cheng


Abstract
Large visual-language models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in visual-language tasks. However, object hallucination remains a significant challenge for LVLMs. Existing studies attribute object hallucinations in LVLMs mainly to linguistic priors and data biases. We further explore the causes of object hallucinations from the perspective of frequency domain and reveal that insufficient frequency information in images amplifies these linguistic priors, increasing the likelihood of hallucinations. To mitigate this issue, we propose the Multi-Frequency Contrastive Decoding (MFCD) method, a simple yet trainingfree approach that removes the hallucination distribution in the original output distribution, which arises from LVLMs neglecting the high-frequency information or low-frequency information in the image input. Without compromising the general capabilities of LVLMs, the proposed MFCD effectively mitigates the object hallucinations in LVLMs. Our experiments demonstrate that MFCD significantly mitigates object hallucination across diverse large-scale vision-language models, without requiring additional training or external tools. In addition, MFCD can be applied to various LVLMs without modifying model architecture or requiring additional training, demonstrating its generality and robustness. Codes are available at https://github.com/liubq-dev/mfcd.
Anthology ID:
2025.emnlp-main.1452
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
EMNLP
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
28556–28572
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.1452/
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Cite (ACL):
Bingqian Liu, Fu Zhang, Guoqing Chen, and Jingwei Cheng. 2025. Multi-Frequency Contrastive Decoding: Alleviating Hallucinations for Large Vision-Language Models. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 28556–28572, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Multi-Frequency Contrastive Decoding: Alleviating Hallucinations for Large Vision-Language Models (Liu et al., EMNLP 2025)
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