Attention at Rest Stays at Rest: Breaking Visual Inertia for Cognitive Hallucination Mitigation

TL;DR

This paper identifies visual attention inertia in multimodal large language models as a cause of cognitive hallucinations and proposes a training-free method, IVE, to dynamically modulate attention and improve inference accuracy.

Contribution

The paper introduces IVE, a novel training-free approach that mitigates visual inertia in MLLMs, enhancing their ability to perform cognitive inference and reduce hallucinations.

Findings

IVE effectively reduces cognitive hallucinations across multiple benchmarks.

Attention inertia is a key factor in the persistence of hallucinations.

IVE improves compositional understanding in various MLLMs.

Abstract

Like a body at rest that stays at rest, we find that visual attention in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) exhibits pronounced inertia, remaining largely static once settled during early decoding steps and failing to support the compositional understanding required for cognitive inference. While existing hallucination mitigation methods mainly target perceptual hallucinations concerning object existence or attributes, they remain inadequate for such cognitive hallucinations that require inter-object relational deduction. Through token-wise attention analysis, we identify this visual inertia as a key factor: attention to semantically critical regions remains persistently focused and fails to dynamically support relational inference. We thereby propose a training-free Inertia-aware Visual Excitation (IVE) method that breaks this inertial pattern by modeling cognitive inference as the dynamic responsiveness of visual attention. Specifically, IVE selects visual tokens that are dynamically emerging relative to historical attention trends while distinguishing tokens exhibiting inertial behavior. To further facilitate compositional inference, IVE introduces an inertia-aware penalty that discourages over-concentration and limits the persistence of attention within localized regions. Extensive experiments show that IVE is effective across various base MLLMs and multiple hallucination benchmarks, particularly for cognitive hallucinations.