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abstract indexed · arXiv 2609.29048 · updated 2026-10-18

Where Hallucinations Live: A Cross-Architecture Circuit in VQ-Tokenized Vision-Language Models

First page of Where Hallucinations Live: A Cross-Architecture Circuit in VQ-Tokenized Vision-Language Models
From the original paper · arXiv 2609.29048Page 1. Select the image to read the PDF.

Replaces mechanism-agnostic decoding-time hallucination mitigations (VCD, DoLA) with a targeted ablation of an early-layer attention routing circuit identified via activation patching in VQ-tokenized vision-language models. Cost is low at inference (a fixed single-layer intervention), but adoption requires full white-box access to model weights, per-model validation with the three-gate diagnostic to confirm the circuit is present, and offline patching analysis the team must run itself. It can fail on non-VQ architectures, on models the diagnostic rejects (15 of 25 tested), and may trade off binary calibration performance, where tuned DoLA remains better.

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recommendation
test
research area
safety and guardrails
technical change
L0 attention-circuit ablation for VQ VLMs
published
2026-09-24

The intervention is cheap and open-source-friendly for locally hosted VQ-tokenized VLMs, but it applies only to a narrow model class and demands weight access plus per-model circuit verification, so it warrants workload-specific testing rather than direct adoption.

About the technical core

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  1. claim 01Paperraft inference
    Read the brief interpretation

    Replaces mechanism-agnostic decoding-time hallucination mitigations (VCD, DoLA) with a targeted ablation of an early-layer attention routing circuit identified via activation patching in VQ-tokenized vision-language models. Cost is low at inference (a fixed single-layer intervention), but adoption requires full white-box access to model weights, per-model validation with the three-gate diagnostic to confirm the circuit is present, and offline patching analysis the team must run itself. It can fail on non-VQ architectures, on models the diagnostic rejects (15 of 25 tested), and may trade off binary calibration performance, where tuned DoLA remains better.

    This is a Paperraft inference. It is not pinned to a verified PDF passage.

    Inspect the source
  2. claim 02Paperraft inference

    L0 ablation reduces object hallucination in open-ended generation by 31% relative on CHAIR_i, while tuned DoLA and VCD leave it unchanged or worsen it.

    This is a Paperraft inference. It is not pinned to a verified PDF passage.

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arXiv 2609.29048

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