English

Hallucination Detection and Evaluation of Large Language Model

Computation and Language 2026-04-10 v2 Information Retrieval

Abstract

Hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs) pose a significant challenge, generating misleading or unverifiable content that undermines trust and reliability. Existing evaluation methods, such as KnowHalu, employ multi-stage verification but suffer from high computational costs. To address this, we integrate the Hughes Hallucination Evaluation Model (HHEM), a lightweight classification-based framework that operates independently of LLM-based judgments, significantly improving efficiency while maintaining high detection accuracy. We conduct a comparative analysis of hallucination detection methods across various LLMs, evaluating True Positive Rate (TPR), True Negative Rate (TNR), and Accuracy on question-answering (QA) and summarization tasks. Our results show that HHEM reduces evaluation time from 8 hours to 10 minutes, while HHEM with non-fabrication checking achieves the highest accuracy 82.2%82.2\% and TPR 78.9%78.9\%. However, HHEM struggles with localized hallucinations in summarization tasks. To address this, we introduce segment-based retrieval, improving detection by verifying smaller text components. Additionally, our cumulative distribution function (CDF) analysis indicates that larger models (7B-9B parameters) generally exhibit fewer hallucinations, while intermediate-sized models show higher instability. These findings highlight the need for structured evaluation frameworks that balance computational efficiency with robust factual validation, enhancing the reliability of LLM-generated content.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2512.22416,
  title  = {Hallucination Detection and Evaluation of Large Language Model},
  author = {Chenggong Zhang and Haopeng Wang and Hexi Meng},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.22416},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T08:42:16.477Z