Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated impressive multimodal abilities but remain prone to multilingual object hallucination, with a higher likelihood of generating responses inconsistent with the visual input when utilizing queries in non-English languages compared to English. Most existing approaches to address these rely on pretraining or fine-tuning, which are resource-intensive. In this paper, inspired by observing the disparities in cross-modal attention patterns across languages, we propose Cross-Lingual Attention Intervention for Mitigating multilingual object hallucination (CLAIM) in LVLMs, a novel near training-free method by aligning attention patterns. CLAIM first identifies language-specific cross-modal attention heads, then estimates language shift vectors from English to the target language, and finally intervenes in the attention outputs during inference to facilitate cross-lingual visual perception capability alignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CLAIM achieves an average improvement of 13.56% (up to 30% in Spanish) on the POPE and 21.75% on the hallucination subsets of the MME benchmark across various languages. Further analysis reveals that multilingual attention divergence is most prominent in intermediate layers, highlighting their critical role in multilingual scenarios.
Mitigating Multilingual Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models
School of Computer Science & Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学计算机科学与技术学院）；School of Computing Science and Technology, Fudan University（复旦大学计算机科学技术学院）；Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology, Peking University（北京大学王选计算机研究所）；School of Computing Science and Technology, Zhejiang Gongshang University（浙江工商大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学计算机科学与工程学系）
