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Hallucinated facts in large language models (LLMs) have recently been shown to obey a statistical lower bound determined by the monofact rate (related to the classical Good-Turing missing mass estimator) minus model miscalibration (Kalai &…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Miranda Muqing Miao , Michael Kearns

Large language models often hallucinate with high confidence on "random facts" that lack inferable patterns. We formalize the memorization of such facts as a membership testing problem, unifying the discrete error metrics of Bloom filters…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Anxin Guo , Jingwei Li

This theoretical work examines 'hallucinations' in both human cognition and large language models, comparing how each system can produce perceptions or outputs that deviate from reality. Drawing on neuroscience and machine learning…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2025-03-11 Sebastian Barros

Despite improvements in performances on different natural language generation tasks, deep neural models are prone to hallucinating facts that are incorrect or nonexistent. Different hypotheses are proposed and examined separately for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-03-30 Yijun Xiao , William Yang Wang

This paper presents a systematic defense of large language model (LLM) hallucinations or 'confabulations' as a potential resource instead of a categorically negative pitfall. The standard view is that confabulations are inherently…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-27 Peiqi Sui , Eamon Duede , Sophie Wu , Richard Jean So

LLM deployment in critical domains is currently impeded by persistent hallucinations--generating plausible but factually incorrect assertions. While scaling laws drove significant improvements in general capabilities, theoretical frameworks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Jiayun Wu , Jiashuo Liu , Zhiyuan Zeng , Tianyang Zhan , Tianle Cai , Wenhao Huang

Hallucination in generative AI is often treated as a technical failure to produce factually correct output. Yet this framing underrepresents the broader significance of hallucinated content in language models, which may appear fluent,…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Zihao Li , Weiwei Yi , Jiahong Chen

Prior works have shown that fine-tuning on new knowledge can induce factual hallucinations in large language models (LLMs), leading to incorrect outputs when evaluated on previously known information. However, the specific manifestations of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Renfei Dang , Peng Hu , Zhejian Lai , Changjiang Gao , Min Zhang , Shujian Huang

Large language models generate outputs stochastically and may produce fluent but invalid responses, including factual hallucinations. Existing mitigation strategies reduce average error rates but do not provide explicit control over the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Sreenivasan Mohandas

Large Language Models (LLMs) are claimed to be capable of Natural Language Inference (NLI), necessary for applied tasks like question answering and summarization. We present a series of behavioral studies on several LLM families (LLaMA,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-24 Nick McKenna , Tianyi Li , Liang Cheng , Mohammad Javad Hosseini , Mark Johnson , Mark Steedman

We formalize hallucinations in generative models as failures to link an estimate to any plausible cause. Under this interpretation, we show that even loss-minimizing optimal estimators still hallucinate. We confirm this with a general high…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Hude Liu , Jerry Yao-Chieh Hu , Jennifer Yuntong Zhang , Zhao Song , Han Liu

Large language models (LLMs) are susceptible to hallucinations -- factually incorrect outputs -- leading to a large body of work on detecting and mitigating such cases. We argue that it is important to distinguish between two types of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Adi Simhi , Jonathan Herzig , Idan Szpektor , Yonatan Belinkov

A major risk of using language models in practical applications is their tendency to hallucinate incorrect statements. Hallucinations are often attributed to knowledge gaps in LMs, but we hypothesize that in some cases, when justifying…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-24 Muru Zhang , Ofir Press , William Merrill , Alisa Liu , Noah A. Smith

The advent of pre-trained language models (PLMs) has enabled significant performance gains in the field of natural language processing. However, recent studies have found PLMs to suffer from miscalibration, indicating a lack of accuracy in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-23 Geetanjali Bihani , Julia Rayz

As large language models continue to develop in the field of AI, text generation systems are susceptible to a worrisome phenomenon known as hallucination. In this study, we summarize recent compelling insights into hallucinations in LLMs.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-09-14 Hongbin Ye , Tong Liu , Aijia Zhang , Wei Hua , Weiqiang Jia

Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed the Natural Language Processing (NLP) landscape with their remarkable ability to understand and generate human-like text. However, these models are prone to ``hallucinations'' -- outputs that do…

Hallucination in Large Language Models (LLMs) refers to the generation of content that is not faithful to the input or the real-world facts. This paper provides a rigorous treatment of hallucination in LLMs, including formal definitions and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-01 Esmail Gumaan

Although demonstrating superb performance on various NLP tasks, large language models (LLMs) still suffer from the hallucination problem, which threatens the reliability of LLMs. To measure the level of hallucination of LLMs, previous works…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-09-12 Li Du , Yequan Wang , Xingrun Xing , Yiqun Ya , Xiang Li , Xin Jiang , Xuezhi Fang

Hallucination is a central limitation of large language models (LLMs), and substantial effort has been devoted to understanding and mitigating it. Towards this, Kalai and Vempala (STOC 2024) introduced a probabilistic framework formalizing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Nishant P. Das , Piyush Srivastava

Hallucinations, the tendency for large language models to provide responses with factually incorrect and unsupported claims, is a serious problem within natural language processing for which we do not yet have an effective solution to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Brandon C. Colelough , Davis Bartels , Dina Demner-Fushman