Mitigating Multimodal LLMs Hallucinations via Relevance Propagation at Inference Time

Abstract

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) achieve strong performance on vision- and audio-language tasks, yet can generate responses that conflict with the given visual or auditory inputs, a problem known as multimodal hallucinations. Prior work suggests that this occurs when models rely more on textual cues and learned language patterns than on evidence from the perceptual input. To obtain a more direct account of this imbalance, we apply Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP), which attributes predictions to individual input tokens, and use the resulting relevance scores to analyze and mitigate hallucinations. First, we examine whether this imbalance leads to multimodal hallucinations. We find that hallucinations often arise when the model relies less on perceptual inputs, and that changing this reliance affects its predictions. We further leverage LRP and propose a training-free framework that shifts relevance toward perceptual tokens by optimizing key-value representations during decoding, without modifying model parameters or requiring training data. We call this method Learning Inference-time Modality Enhancement (LIME). Despite using no spatial or temporal supervision, LIME concentrates relevance on query-relevant regions. We evaluate LIME across multiple multimodal benchmarks in both vision and audio domains, demonstrating consistent reductions in hallucinations and enhanced grounding while preserving generation quality.