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On Early Detection of Hallucinations in Factual Question Answering (arxiv.org)
1 point by PaulHoule on Jan 4, 2024 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: By checking which words the model leaned on, how confident it was, and what its inner layers were doing, a classifier can flag made-up answers. These signals separated made-up from correct answers with a 0.80 score, and words before the error already predicted it.

Abstract

While large language models (LLMs) have taken great strides towards helping humans with a plethora of tasks, hallucinations remain a major impediment towards gaining user trust. The fluency and coherence of model generations even when hallucinating makes detection a difficult task. In this work, we explore if the artifacts associated with the model generations can provide hints that the generation will contain hallucinations. Specifically, we probe LLMs at 1) the inputs via Integrated Gradients based token attribution, 2) the outputs via the Softmax probabilities, and 3) the internal state via self-attention and fully-connected layer activations for signs of hallucinations on open-ended question answering tasks. Our results show that the distributions of these artifacts tend to differ between hallucinated and non-hallucinated generations. Building on this insight, we train binary classifiers that use these artifacts as input features to classify model generations into hallucinations and non-hallucinations. These hallucination classifiers achieve up to $0.80$ AUROC. We also show that tokens preceding a hallucination can already predict the subsequent hallucination even before it occurs.

Ben Snyder, Marius Moisescu, Muhammad Bilal Zafar
arXiv:2312.14183 · cs.CL, cs.AI · submitted Dec 19, 2023 · updated Aug 22, 2024
abstract · pdf · html · KDD 2024

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Also discussed: Dec 2023 (2 points, 2 comments)