arXiv Machine Learning

Attention Sinks as Internal Signals for Hallucination Detection in Large Language Models

arXiv:2604. 10697v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models frequently exhibit hallucinations: fluent and confident outputs that are factually incorrect or unsupported by the input context.

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
2d ago

External Observers May See More Clearly: Cross-Model Span-Level Hallucination Detection in Large Language Models via Hidden State Probing

The paper proposes a hidden‑state probing method for detecting hallucinations at the span level in large language model outputs, moving beyond token‑wise binary classification. By examining layer‑wise activation patterns, the approach identifies the exact onset and continuation tokens of hallucinations, achieving higher precision‑recall AUC than random baselines despite class imbalance. Additionally, the authors introduce a cross‑model detection framework where one model observes another’s internal representations, showing that an external observer can match or surpass the generator’s own self‑detection of hallucination onsets, even when the observer is smaller.

By Kingshuk Gupta, Davide Buscaldi
arXiv AI
Aug 20

Temporal Multi-Signal Fusion for Token-Level Hallucination Detection

The paper introduces a token‑level hallucination detector that treats hallucinations as temporally extended spans and uses sequence labeling. It fuses 33‑dimensional features from text statistics, NLI entailment, and language‑model surprisal, and applies a BiGRU to achieve an AUC of 0.840 on RAGTruth, outperforming a logistic‑regression baseline by 11 points. The study shows that temporal ordering of features, rather than model capacity, drives most of the performance gain, and the detector remains effective on unseen language models with less than 4% AUC loss.

By Igor Itkin
arXiv AI
Jun 30

FADE: Mitigating Hallucinations by Reducing Language-Prior Dominance in Large Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2606. 29431v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Despite the impressive capabilities of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), they remain susceptible to hallucination, generating content inconsistent with the input image.

By Yichen Guo, Kai Tang, Fenglai Lin, Yiding Sun, Dongshuo Zhang, Wenya Wang, Lin William Cong, Shanghang Zhang
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

Overview of SHROOM-Visions 2026: A Shared Task on Hallucination Detection in Large Vision-Language Models

In 2026, the SHROOM-Visions shared task was launched at the UncertaiNLP Workshop co‑located with EMNLP to address hallucinations in large vision‑language models. The task builds on the SHEEP dataset and asks participants to detect and classify fine‑grained hallucination spans in image‑conditioned text generation across four languages (Chinese, English, French, Italian) using a five‑class taxonomy. The competition attracted 27 teams and over 600 system submissions, with top systems achieving character‑level, label‑conditioned, and IoU scores of 0.58, 0.46, and 0.51 respectively, surpassing baselines by 30‑40 points.

By Ra\'ul V\'azquez, Aman Sinha, Chuyuan Li, Claudio Savelli, Eduardo Cal\`o, Emilio Raimond, Stella Frank, Hengyu Luo, Flavio Giobergia, Vincent Segonne, Lorenzo Vaiani, J\"org Tiedemann, Timothee Mickus