We study object hallucination in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) and improve visual contrastive decoding (VCD) by constructing an object-aligned auxiliary view. We leverage object-centric attention in self-supervised Vision Transformers. In particular, we remove the most salient visual evidence to construct an auxiliary view that disrupts unsupported tokens and produces a stronger contrast signal. Our method is prompt-agnostic, model-agnostic, and can be seamlessly plugged into the existing VCD pipeline with little computation overhead, i.e., a single cacheable forward pass. Empirically, our method demonstrates consistent gains on two popular object hallucination benchmarks across two MLLMs.
@article{arxiv.2602.11737,
title = {Mask What Matters: Mitigating Object Hallucinations in Multimodal Large Language Models with Object-Aligned Visual Contrastive Decoding},
author = {Boqi Chen and Xudong Liu and Jianing Qiu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.11737},
year = {2026}
}