arXiv Computation and Language

PHRBench: A Behavioral Evaluation of Post-Hallucination Reasoning in LLMs

PHRBench is a new benchmark that evaluates how large language models handle hallucinated information during multi-stage reasoning. It tests 18 models across four domains using 4,820 controlled instances, measuring Hallucination Compliance, Hallucination Avoidance, and Heuristic Correction to determine if a model can correct hallucinated premises and still reach the correct answer. The study finds that successful recovery is rare, often requires frequent belief updates, and that features of the hallucinated prompt can predict recovery with an AUROC of 0.847.

arXiv Computation and Language
3d ago

Reasoning Error from Known Fact: Step-Level Self-Consistency Group Relative Policy Optimization for LLMs

The paper introduces Step-level Self-Consistency Group Relative Policy Optimization (SSC‑GRPO), a method that assigns rewards to individual steps in a reasoning trace by evaluating self‑consistency across multiple rollouts. It targets Context‑Sensitive Factual Hallucinations—errors that arise when a model has the correct knowledge but produces false statements due to contextual interference. SSC‑GRPO outperforms previous approaches on mathematical reasoning benchmarks and hallucination leaderboards, offering a new way to detect and reduce hallucinations in large language model reasoning.

By Xiaomeng Hu, Jiaqi Hu, Hao Chen, Qi Zhang, Zhanming Shen, Wentao Ye, Junbo Zhao
arXiv AI
Aug 26

Gated Activation Steering for Reducing Sycophancy & Hallucination in Medical Question Answering

The paper introduces Gated Activation Steering, an inference-time intervention that jointly mitigates hallucination and sycophancy in medical question answering. By learning separate steering directions from contrastive clinical pairs and applying them to specific attention heads, the method uses behavior‑specific gates to intervene only when needed. Experiments on EHR‑based clinical questions show that the 4‑billion‑parameter model with gated steering outperforms its unsteered counterpart and rivals larger models in resisting user pressure.

By Himanshu Tripathi, Subash Neupane, Shaswata Mitra, Sudip Mittal, Noorbakhsh Amiri Golilarz, Shahram Rahimi
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