When Semantics Mislead Vision: Mitigating Large Multimodal Models Hallucinations in Scene Text Spotting and Understanding
Yan Shu, Hangui Lin, Yexin Liu, Yan Zhang, Gangyan Zeng, Yan Li, Yu Zhou, Ser Nam Lim, Harry Yang, Nicu Sebe
Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have achieved impressive progress in visual perception and reasoning. However, when confronted with visually ambiguous or non-semantic scene text, they often struggle to accurately spot and understand the content, frequently generating semantically plausible yet visually incorrect answers, which we refer to as semantic hallucination.In this work, we investigate the underlying causes of semantic hallucination and identify a key finding:  Transformer layers in LLM with stronger attention focus on scene text regions are less prone to producing semantic hallucinations. Thus, we propose a training-free semantic hallucination mitigation framework comprising two key components: (1) ZoomText, a coarse-to-fine strategy that identifies potential text regions without external detectors; and (2) Grounded Layer Correction, which adaptively leverages the internal representations from layers less prone to hallucination to guide decoding, correcting hallucinated outputs for non-semantic samples while preserving the semantics of meaningful ones. To enable rigorous evaluation, we introduce TextHalu-Bench, a benchmark of over 1,730 samples spanning both semantic and non-semantic cases, with manually curated question–answer pairs designed to probe model hallucinations.Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method not only effectively mitigates semantic hallucination but also achieves strong performance on public benchmarks for scene text spotting and understanding.