Paper Summary
Paperzilla title
Making MLLMs More Truthful: Reward-Guided Decoding for Fewer Hallucinations
This paper introduces Multimodal Reward-Guided Decoding (MRGD), a new technique to reduce hallucinations in MLLM-generated image captions by incorporating rewards for both precision and recall during decoding. This method offers control over this trade-off at inference time, achieving superior hallucination mitigation and recall compared to existing methods. The authors also demonstrate a trade-off between visual grounding and computational cost during inference, controlled by the search breadth.
Possible Conflicts of Interest
Some authors are affiliated with Meta, which has a vested interest in developing MLLMs.
Identified Weaknesses
The evaluation is primarily conducted on image captioning benchmarks focused on object hallucinations. It remains to be seen how well MRGD generalizes to other types of visual hallucinations or other multimodal tasks.
Limited Model Generalization
The study is limited to certain models, making it important to see how well this technique generalizes. While they show some transfer to newer models, broader testing is essential.
Increased Computational Cost
While effective in some cases, it's important to understand that this method requires more compute at inference time. The impact on real-world latency is a consideration.
Rating Explanation
This paper presents a novel and valuable approach to controlling MLLM outputs during inference, showing improvements in reducing hallucinations while offering flexibility in controlling the trade-off between precision and recall. While limitations exist regarding the evaluation scope and computational cost, the method's novelty, effectiveness, and potential impact warrant a strong rating.
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File Information
Original Title:
Controlling Multimodal LLMs via Reward-guided Decoding
Uploaded:
August 18, 2025 at 08:06 PM
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