When Relations Break: Analyzing Relation Hallucination in Vision-Language Model Under Rotation and Noise
Philip Wootaek Shin, Ajay Narayanan Sridhar, Sivani Devarapalli, Rui Zhang, Jack Sampson, Vijaykrishnan Narayanan
Abstract
Vision-language models (VLMs) achieve strong multimodal performance but remain prone to relation hallucination, which requires accurate reasoning over inter-object interactions. We study the impact of visual perturbations, specifically rotation and noise, and show that even mild distortions significantly degrade relational reasoning across models and datasets. We further evaluate prompt-based augmentation and preprocessing strategies (orientation correction and denoising), finding that while they offer partial improvements, they do not fully resolve hallucinations. Our results reveal a gap between perceptual robustness and relational understanding, highlighting the need for more robust, geometry-aware VLMs.
Topics
Classified with taxonomy v2 on Wed, 2 Sept 2026.