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Related papers: Hallucinations Live in Variance

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Despite numerous attempts at mitigation since the inception of language models, hallucinations remain a persistent problem even in today's frontier LLMs. Why is this? We review existing definitions of hallucination and fold them into a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Emmy Liu , Varun Gangal , Chelsea Zou , Michael Yu , Xiaoqi Huang , Alex Chang , Zhuofu Tao , Karan Singh , Sachin Kumar , Steven Y. Feng

Reasoning hallucinations in large language models (LLMs) often appear as fluent yet unsupported conclusions that violate either the given context or underlying factual knowledge. Although such failures are widely observed, the mechanisms by…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Xinnan Dai , Kai Yang , Cheng Luo , Shenglai Zeng , Kai Guo , Jiliang Tang

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

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

Reasoning failures in large language models (LLMs) are typically measured only at the end of a generation, yet many failures manifest as a process-level breakdown: the model "loses the thread" mid-reasoning. We study whether such breakdowns…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Jinkun Chen , Fengxiang Cheng , Sijia Han , Vlado Keselj

Large Language Models often generate factually incorrect but plausible outputs, known as hallucinations. We identify a more insidious phenomenon, LLM delusion, defined as high belief hallucinations, incorrect outputs with abnormally high…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Hongshen Xu , Zixv yang , Zichen Zhu , Kunyao Lan , Zihan Wang , Mengyue Wu , Ziwei Ji , Lu Chen , Pascale Fung , Kai Yu

Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit deficient reasoning or generate hallucinations. To address these, studies prefixed with "Self-" such as Self-Consistency, Self-Improve, and Self-Refine have been initiated. They share a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-19 Xun Liang , Shichao Song , Zifan Zheng , Hanyu Wang , Qingchen Yu , Xunkai Li , Rong-Hua Li , Yi Wang , Zhonghao Wang , Feiyu Xiong , Zhiyu Li

Recent studies have examined attention dynamics in large vision-language models (LVLMs) to detect hallucinations. However, existing approaches remain limited in reliably distinguishing hallucinated from factually grounded outputs, as they…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Xiaofeng Zhang , Yuanchao Zhu , Chaochen Gu , Xiaosong Yuan , Qiyan Zhao , Jiawei Cao , Feilong Tang , Sinan Fan , Yaomin Shen , Chen Shen , Hao Tang

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being adopted as the cognitive core of embodied agents. However, inherited hallucinations, which stem from failures to ground user instructions in the observed physical environment, can lead to…

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

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

Recent work has demonstrated state-of-the-art results in large language model (LLM) hallucination detection and mitigation through consistency-based approaches which involve aggregating multiple responses sampled from a single LLM for a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Demian Till , John Smeaton , Peter Haubrick , Gouse Saheb , Florian Graef , David Berman

Detecting hallucinations in large language models (LLMs) remains a fundamental challenge for their trustworthy deployment. Going beyond basic uncertainty-driven hallucination detection frameworks, we propose a simple yet powerful method…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Rui Wang , Zeming Wei , Guanzhang Yue , Meng Sun

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

Large language models (LLMs) hallucinate with confidence: their outputs can be fluent, authoritative, and simply wrong. In medical, legal, and scientific applications this failure causes direct harm, and detecting it from internal model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Khizar Hussain , Murat Kantarcioglu

We propose a lightweight and single-pass uncertainty quantification method for detecting hallucinations in Large Language Models. The method uses attention matrices to estimate uncertainty without requiring repeated sampling or external…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Gijs van Dijk

Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful linguistic engines but remain susceptible to hallucinations: plausible-sounding outputs that are factually incorrect or unsupported. In this work, we present a mathematically grounded framework to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-20 Moses Kiprono

Large language models (LLMs) frequently generate hallucinations-content that deviates from factual accuracy or provided context-posing challenges for diagnosis due to the complex interplay of underlying causes. This paper introduces a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-18 Yiyou Sun , Yu Gai , Lijie Chen , Abhilasha Ravichander , Yejin Choi , Dawn Song

Generative AI increasingly supports scientific inference, from protein structure prediction to weather forecasting. Yet its distinctive failure mode, hallucination, raises epistemic alarm bells. I argue that this failure mode can be…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Charles Rathkopf

We present causal evidence that hallucination in autoregressive language models is an early trajectory commitment governed by asymmetric attractor dynamics. Using same-prompt bifurcation, in which we repeatedly sample identical inputs to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-20 G. Aytug Akarlar