RelCheck: Dual-Evidence Spatial Grounding for VLM Hallucination Correction

Abstract

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) fre- quently generate text that is inconsistent with the input image. While object- and attribute-level hallucinations have received considerable attention, relational hallucinations (incorrect de- scriptions of spatial or interactive relationships between objects) remain largely unaddressed by existing post-hoc correction methods. We present RelCheck, a training-free post-hoc correction pipeline that augments object-level visual grounding with dual relational evidence: learned scene-graph triples from RelTR and deterministic spatial predicates from bounding-box geometry. These combine with a Woodpecker-style object claim layer to form a three-layer visual knowledge base, which a language model corrector uses to rewrite hallucinated text. Evaluated on LLaVA v1 13B, RelCheck achieves a total MME hallucination score of 630.0 versus 585.0 for a Woodpecker-style baseline, with the largest gain on the position subtask (+31.7 points, accuracy+ improving from 0.367 to 0.600). A four-configuration ablation confirms that both relational layers contribute independently (McNemar p = 0.025). These results show that structured relational evidence meaningfully improves post-hoc hallucination correction on the spatial reasoning subtasks where current MLLMs are most deficient.