Can We Trust AI Doctors? A Survey of Medical Hallucination in Large Language and Large Vision-Language Models

Abstract

Hallucination has emerged as a critical challenge for large language models (LLMs) and large vision-language models (LVLMs), particularly in high-stakes medical applications. Despite its significance, dedicated research on medical hallucination remains unexplored. In this survey, we first provide a unified perspective on medical hallucination for both LLMs and LVLMs, and delve into its causes. Subsequently, we review recent advancements in detecting, evaluating, and mitigating medical hallucinations, offering a comprehensive overview of evaluation benchmarks, metrics, and strategies developed to tackle this issue. Moreover, we delineate the current challenges and delve into new frontiers, thereby shedding light on future research. We hope this work coupled with open-source resources can provide the community with quick access and spur breakthrough research in medical hallucination.