EventHallusion: Diagnosing Event Hallucinations in Video LLMs

Abstract: Recently, Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) have made significant progress in the video comprehension field. Despite remarkable content reasoning and instruction following capabilities they demonstrated, the hallucination problem of these VideoLLMs is less explored compared with its counterpart in the image domain. To mitigate this gap, we propose EventHallusion, a novel benchmark that focuses on assessing the VideoLLMs' hallucination toward event, the crux of video analysis. From a hallucination attribution perspective, our EventHallusion benchmark is curated to assess a VideoLLM's susceptibility toward language priors and vision-language biases. On the other hand, we also propose a simple yet effective method, called Temporal Contrastive Decoding (TCD), to tackle the hallucination problems of VideoLLMs. The proposed TCD method rectifies the model's bias toward its priors during the decoding stage by comparing the original video with a modified version, in which temporal cues are disrupted. Through comprehensive evaluation of eight open-source and two closed-source VideoLLMs on the proposed EventHallusion benchmark, we observe that the open-source models suffer significantly from hallucination problems, whereas the closed-source ones perform markedly better. By further equipping open-source VideoLLMs with the proposed TCD approach, evident performance improvements are achieved across most metrics in the EventHallusion benchmark. Our codes and benchmark data are available at https://github.com/Stevetich/EventHallusion.