English

The Phenomenology of Hallucinations

Artificial Intelligence 2026-03-17 v1 Computation and Language Machine Learning

Abstract

We show that language models hallucinate not because they fail to detect uncertainty, but because of a failure to integrate it into output generation. Across architectures, uncertain inputs are reliably identified, occupying high-dimensional regions with 2-3×\times the intrinsic dimensionality of factual inputs. However, this internal signal is weakly coupled to the output layer: uncertainty migrates into low-sensitivity subspaces, becoming geometrically amplified yet functionally silent. Topological analysis shows that uncertainty representations fragment rather than converging to a unified abstention state, while gradient and Fisher probes reveal collapsing sensitivity along the uncertainty direction. Because cross-entropy training provides no attractor for abstention and uniformly rewards confident prediction, associative mechanisms amplify these fractured activations until residual coupling forces a committed output despite internal detection. Causal interventions confirm this account by restoring refusal when uncertainty is directly connected to logits.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.13911,
  title  = {The Phenomenology of Hallucinations},
  author = {Valeria Ruscio and Keiran Thompson},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.13911},
  year   = {2026}
}