CLAIM: Mitigating Multilingual Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models with Cross-Lingual Attention Intervention

ACL ARR 2025 February Submission3394 Authors

Abstract: 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 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.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: Multilingualism and Cross-Lingual NLP

Research Area Keywords: cross-lingual transfer

Contribution Types: NLP engineering experiment

Languages Studied: English,Chinese,Spanish,Russian,Hindi,Bulgarian,German,Portuguese

Submission Number: 3394