Sangmin Woo


2025

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Black-Box Visual Prompt Engineering for Mitigating Object Hallucination in Large Vision Language Models
Sangmin Woo | Kang Zhou | Yun Zhou | Shuai Wang | Sheng Guan | Haibo Ding | Lin Lee Cheong
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 2: Short Papers)

Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) often suffer from object hallucination, which undermines their reliability. Surprisingly, we find that simple object-based visual prompting—overlaying visual cues (e.g., bounding box, circle) on images—can significantly mitigate such hallucination; however, different visual prompts (VPs) vary in effectiveness. To address this, we propose Black-Box Visual Prompt Engineering (BBVPE), a framework to identify optimal VPs that enhance LVLM responses without needing access to model internals. Our approach employs a pool of candidate VPs and trains a router model to dynamically select the most effective VP for a given input image. This black-box approach is model-agnostic, making it applicable to both open-source and proprietary LVLMs. Evaluations on benchmarks such as POPE and CHAIR demonstrate that BBVPE effectively reduces object hallucination.