News image captioning requires model to generate an informative caption rich in entities, with the news image and the associated news article. Current MLLMs still bear limitations in handling entity information in news image captioning tasks. Besides, generating high-quality news image captions requires a tradeoff between sufficiency and conciseness of textual input information. To explore the potential of MLLMs, we propose an Entity-Aware Multimodal Alignment (EAMA) based approach for News Image Captioning. Our approach first aligns the MLLM with two extra alignment tasks: Entity-Aware Sentence Selection task and Entity Selection task, together with News Image Captioning task. The aligned MLLM will utilize the additional entity-related information extracted by itself to supplement the textual input while generating news image captions. Our approach achieves better results than all previous models on two mainstream news image captioning datasets.

Large language models (LLMs) excel at various natural language processing tasks, but their tendency to generate hallucinations undermines their reliability. Existing hallucination detection methods leveraging hidden states predominantly focus on static and isolated representations, overlooking their dynamic evolution across layers, which limits efficacy. To address this limitation, we shift the focus to the hidden state update process and introduce a novel metric, the ICR Score (Information Contribution to Residual Stream), which quantifies the contribution of modules to the hidden states’ update. We empirically validate that the ICR Score is effective and reliable in distinguishing hallucinations. Building on these insights, we propose a hallucination detection method, the ICR Probe, which captures the cross-layer evolution of hidden states. Experimental results show that the ICR Probe achieves superior performance with significantly fewer parameters. Furthermore, ablation studies and case analyses offer deeper insights into the underlying mechanism of this method, improving its interpretability.

Despite the rapid advancement of large language models, they remain highly susceptible to generating hallucinations, which significantly hinders their widespread application. Hallucination research requires dynamic and fine-grained evaluation. However, most existing hallucination benchmarks (especially in Chinese language) rely on human annotations, making automatical and cost-effective hallucination evaluation challenging. To address this, we introduce HaluAgent, an agentic framework that automatically constructs fine-grained question-answering (QA) dataset based on some knowledge documents. Our experiments demonstrate that the manually designed rules and prompt optimization can improve the quality of generated data. Using HaluAgent, we construct C-FAITH, a Chinese QA hallucination benchmark created from 1,399 knowledge documents obtained from web scraping, totaling 60,702 entries. We comprehensively evaluate 16 mainstream LLMs with our proposed C-FAITH, providing detailed experimental results and analysis.

Xinze Zhang, Junzhe Zhang, Zhenhua Chen, Kun He. Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2021.