English

Shared Imagination: LLMs Hallucinate Alike

Computation and Language 2024-07-24 v1

Abstract

Despite the recent proliferation of large language models (LLMs), their training recipes -- model architecture, pre-training data and optimization algorithm -- are often very similar. This naturally raises the question of the similarity among the resulting models. In this paper, we propose a novel setting, imaginary question answering (IQA), to better understand model similarity. In IQA, we ask one model to generate purely imaginary questions (e.g., on completely made-up concepts in physics) and prompt another model to answer. Surprisingly, despite the total fictionality of these questions, all models can answer each other's questions with remarkable success, suggesting a "shared imagination space" in which these models operate during such hallucinations. We conduct a series of investigations into this phenomenon and discuss implications on model homogeneity, hallucination, and computational creativity.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2407.16604,
  title  = {Shared Imagination: LLMs Hallucinate Alike},
  author = {Yilun Zhou and Caiming Xiong and Silvio Savarese and Chien-Sheng Wu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.16604},
  year   = {2024}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T17:51:04.388Z