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Related papers: Why Language Models Hallucinate

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Large language models are known to hallucinate when faced with unfamiliar queries, but the underlying mechanism that govern how models hallucinate are not yet fully understood. In this work, we find that unfamiliar examples in the models'…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-30 Katie Kang , Eric Wallace , Claire Tomlin , Aviral Kumar , Sergey Levine

Large language models (LLMs) have been found to produce hallucinations when the question exceeds their internal knowledge boundaries. A reliable model should have a clear perception of its knowledge boundaries, providing correct answers…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-20 Shiyu Ni , Keping Bi , Lulu Yu , Jiafeng Guo

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to possess impressive capabilities, while also raising crucial concerns about the faithfulness of their responses. A primary issue arising in this context is the management of (un)answerable…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-14 Aviv Slobodkin , Omer Goldman , Avi Caciularu , Ido Dagan , Shauli Ravfogel

Despite substantial advances, large language models (LLMs) continue to exhibit hallucinations, generating plausible yet incorrect responses. In this paper, we highlight a critical yet previously underexplored class of hallucinations driven…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-24 Shaowen Wang , Yiqi Dong , Ruinian Chang , Tansheng Zhu , Yuebo Sun , Kaifeng Lyu , Jian Li

Large language model (LLM) systems suffer from the models' unstable ability to generate valid and factual content, resulting in hallucination generation. Current hallucination detection methods heavily rely on out-of-model information…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-20 Peiran Wang , Yang Liu , Yunfei Lu , Jue Hong , Ye Wu

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

_Uncertainty expressions_ such as "probably" or "highly unlikely" are pervasive in human language. While prior work has established that there is population-level agreement in terms of how humans quantitatively interpret these expressions,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-08 Catarina G Belem , Markelle Kelly , Mark Steyvers , Sameer Singh , Padhraic Smyth

LLMs often adopt an assertive language style also when making false claims. Such ``overconfident hallucinations'' mislead users and erode trust. Achieving the ability to express in language the actual degree of uncertainty around a claim is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-24 Ziwei Ji , Lei Yu , Yeskendir Koishekenov , Yejin Bang , Anthony Hartshorn , Alan Schelten , Cheng Zhang , Pascale Fung , Nicola Cancedda

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

While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a range of downstream tasks, a significant concern revolves around their propensity to exhibit hallucinations: LLMs occasionally generate content that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Yue Zhang , Yafu Li , Leyang Cui , Deng Cai , Lemao Liu , Tingchen Fu , Xinting Huang , Enbo Zhao , Yu Zhang , Chen Xu , Yulong Chen , Longyue Wang , Anh Tuan Luu , Wei Bi , Freda Shi , Shuming Shi

Hallucinations, a phenomenon where a language model (LM) generates nonfactual content, pose a significant challenge to the practical deployment of LMs. While many empirical methods have been proposed to mitigate hallucinations, recent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Atsushi Suzuki , Yulan He , Feng Tian , Zhongyuan Wang

Language models have shown strong capabilities across a wide range of tasks in software engineering, such as code generation, yet they suffer from hallucinations. While hallucinations have been studied independently in natural language and…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-08-13 Chunhua Liu , Hong Yi Lin , Patanamon Thongtanunam

While the problem of hallucinations in neural machine translation has long been recognized, so far the progress on its alleviation is very little. Indeed, recently it turned out that without artificially encouraging models to hallucinate,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-12-21 David Dale , Elena Voita , Loïc Barrault , Marta R. Costa-jussà

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved a degree of success in generating coherent and contextually relevant text, yet they remain prone to a significant challenge known as hallucination: producing information that is not substantiated…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Ray Li , Tanishka Bagade , Kevin Martinez , Flora Yasmin , Grant Ayala , Michael Lam , Kevin Zhu

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

Despite their impressive ability to generate high-quality and fluent text, generative large language models (LLMs) also produce hallucinations: statements that are misaligned with established world knowledge or provided input context.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-15 Abhilasha Ravichander , Shrusti Ghela , David Wadden , Yejin Choi

A major barrier towards the practical deployment of large language models (LLMs) is their lack of reliability. Three situations where this is particularly apparent are correctness, hallucinations when given unanswerable questions, and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-18 Christian Tomani , Kamalika Chaudhuri , Ivan Evtimov , Daniel Cremers , Mark Ibrahim

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) can make up answers that are not real, and this is known as hallucination. This research aims to see if, how, and to what extent LLMs are aware of hallucination. More specifically, we check whether and how an…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-16 Hanyu Duan , Yi Yang , Kar Yan Tam

Plausible, but inaccurate, tokens in model-generated text are widely believed to be pervasive and problematic for the responsible adoption of language models. Despite this concern, there is little scientific work that attempts to measure…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-06 Justin D. Norman , Michael U. Rivera , D. Alex Hughes