The Instinctive Bias: Spurious Images lead to Hallucination in MLLMs
Tianyang Han Qing Lian Rui Pan Renjie Pi Jipeng Zhang Shizhe Diao Yong Lin Tong Zhang
Large language models (LLMs) have recently experienced remarkable progress,
where the advent of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) has endowed LLMs
with visual capabilities, leading to impressive performances in various
multi-modal tasks. However, those powerful MLLMs such as GPT-4V still fail
spectacularly when presented with certain image and text inputs. In this paper,
we identify a typical class of inputs that baffles MLLMs, which consist of
images that are highly relevant but inconsistent with answers, causing MLLMs to
suffer from hallucination. To quantify the effect, we propose CorrelationQA,
the first benchmark that assesses the hallucination level given spurious
images. This benchmark contains 7,308 text-image pairs across 13 categories.
Based on the proposed CorrelationQA, we conduct a thorough analysis on 9
mainstream MLLMs, illustrating that they universally suffer from this
instinctive bias to varying degrees. We hope that our curated benchmark and
evaluation results aid in better assessments of the MLLMs' robustness in the
presence of misleading images. The resource is available in
https://github.com/MasaiahHan/CorrelationQA.