Toward a Stable, Fair, and Comprehensive Evaluation of Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models

Given different instructions, large vision-language models (LVLMs) exhibit different degrees of object hallucinations, posing a significant challenge to the evaluation of object hallucinations. Overcoming this challenge, existing object hallucination evaluation methods average the results obtained from a set of instructions. However, these methods fail to provide consistent evaluation across instruction sets that generate image descriptions of significantly different lengths. In this paper, we present the first systematic investigation of the effect of instructions on object hallucinations in LVLMs, with a specific focus on the role played by image description lengths. A valuable finding is that instructions indirectly affect hallucinations through the length of image descriptions. The longer the image description, the higher the object hallucination degree. Accordingly, we fit an informative length-hallucination curve, upon which a fine-grained evaluation framework named LeHaCE is introduced for evaluating object hallucinations at any given image description length. LeHaCE evaluates the object hallucination degree at a uniform image description length to mitigate the effect of description lengths, promoting stability and fairness. Moreover, LeHaCE incorporates the curve slope as an innovative hallucination evaluation metric, reflecting the extent to which the object hallucination degree is affected by the image description length, achieving a more comprehensive evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate that LeHaCE provides a more stable, fair, and comprehensive evaluation of object hallucinations in LVLMs compared to existing methods.