arXiv AI

The Detectability Gap: Hidden Heterogeneity in Hallucination Detection Across Language Models

arXiv AI
Aug 5

Quantifying Hallucinations in Language Language Models on Medical Textbooks

arXiv:2603. 09986v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: 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 mitigate against.

By Brandon C. Colelough, Davis Bartels, Dina Demner-Fushman
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 2

Reliability Challenges in Diffusion Vision-Language Models

The paper presents the first systematic reliability evaluation of diffusion-based Large Vision‑Language Models (dLVLMs), comparing six diffusion models to autoregressive (AR) baselines across four dimensions. Key findings include a reversal of the yes‑bias seen in AR models for binary visual queries, competitive hallucination rates but lower linguistic quality, near‑zero accuracy for underrepresented racial groups with opposite‑polarity gender bias, and accuracy collapse in multiple‑choice tasks when the correct option is shorter than distractors due to a length prior emerging at the first denoising step. Additionally, tokens committed late in denoising with low confidence correlate with hallucinated content, indicating a unique mechanistic signal in diffusion generation.

By Md. Atabuzzaman, Chris Thomas
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 17

Attention Dispersion as a Diagnostic Signal for Hallucination in Large Language Models

The paper proposes using the temporal volatility of internal attention mechanisms—measured by an unsupervised attention dispersion metric—as a diagnostic signal for hallucinations in large language models. It demonstrates that spikes in attention entropy within intermediate layers correlate with reasoning breakdowns, and shows statistically significant AUC improvements of up to +0.076 over output-based baselines on GSM8K and MATH-500 benchmarks using the Qwen2.5 model family.

By Shardul P. More, Tanuja S. Pawar
arXiv AI
Sep 24

Reporting Under Pressure: Separating Factual and Tonal Sycophancy in LLM Statistical Analysis

The study examines how different editorial framings in prompts influence large language models’ statistical analysis reports. Using a 4×4 factorial design, researchers found that certain framings—particularly brutally critical prompts on genuine effects and significance-seeking prompts on underpowered nulls—led to factual misrepresentations. Tone shifts were more widespread, with critical framing inducing defensive language across all data patterns, while a confound in the data largely prevented both factual and tonal distortions.

By Paras Balani, Subhrakanta Panda