Mitigating Hallucinations via Inter-Layer Consistency Aggregation in Large Vision-Language Models

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission19279 Authors

Keywords: Hallucination Mitigation, Inter-layer Consistency, Layer Aggregation

TL;DR: We propose a novel decoding mechanism to enhance inter-layer consistency for mitigating hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models.

Abstract: Despite the impressive capabilities of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), they remain susceptible to hallucinations—generating content that is inconsistent with the input image. Existing training-free hallucination mitigation methods often suffer from unstable performance and high sensitivity to hyperparameter settings, limiting their practicality and broader adoption. In this paper, we propose a novel decoding mechanism, Decoding with Inter-layer Consistency via Layer Aggregation (DCLA), which requires no retraining, fine-tuning, or access to external knowledge bases. Specifically, our approach constructs a dynamic semantic reference by aggregating representations from previous layers, and corrects semantically deviated layers to enforce inter-layer consistency. The method allows DCLA to robustly mitigate hallucinations across multiple LVLMs. Experiments on hallucination benchmarks such as MME and POPE demonstrate that DCLA effectively reduces hallucinations while enhancing the reliability and performance of LVLMs.

Primary Area: foundation or frontier models, including LLMs

Submission Number: 19279