arXiv Computation and Language

Hindsight-Guided Rationale Distillation for Rare Disease Diagnosis

arXiv AI
Jul 17

Answer-Conditioned Chains of Thought Degrade Verifiable-Reasoning Distillation in Large Language Models

arXiv:2607. 14552v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A standard recipe for distilling the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs) is to sample chains of thought from the model, keep those that reach the correct final answer, and fine-tune on the survivors.

By Jungseob Lee, Seungyoon Lee, Suhyune Son, Dongyub Jude Lee, Sungbin Han, Sugyeong Eo, Heuiseok Lim
arXiv AI
Aug 28

MedFabric: Gold Evidence Hides the Difficulty of Word-Level Medical Fabrication Detection

MedFabric is a new benchmark for detecting word‑level medical fabrications, comprising 646 fabricated statements each paired with a ground‑truth passage that shares the same LLM authorship and nearly identical wording. The study shows that current detectors perform poorly—expert clinicians achieve only 53.3% macro‑F1 and no detector family surpasses 60% without gold evidence—highlighting that detection hinges on evidence correctness rather than subtlety of fabrication. The authors demonstrate that a retrieval‑confidence gate can substantially improve performance, raising macro‑F1 from 61% to 74%.

By Tung Sum Thomas Kwok, Qian Qian, Xiaofeng Lin, Dongxu Zhang, Jun Han, Zhichao Yang, Davin Hill, Tamer Soliman, Sanjit Singh Batra, Robert Tillman, Guang Cheng
arXiv AI
Oct 15

MedEvo: Medical Reasoning Evolution through Knowledge Navigation

arXiv:2610.17690v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Medical multimodal reasoning models are typically trained on teacher-generated rationales, discarding the valid reasoning in students' own failed traje...

By Xiaoliang Wang, Zhuo Chen, Chuanyang Zheng, Quanbin Wang, Jiangwei Lao, Yingao Liu, Jiajia Liu, Jinming Cao, Honglin Lin, Zhihong Lu, Hao Jin, Jian Wang, Lijun Wu
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 14

Reference-Based Distillation Detection in LLMs

arXiv:2607. 09692v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model distillation -- training on outputs from stronger third-party models -- is widely used to boost performance, but raises concerns about unfair advantages and policy violations.

By Rajat Rawat, Sizhe Chen, Akshay Anand, Michael Duan, Bob Rotsted, Sewon Min
arXiv AI
Oct 9

Distillation for Incrimination and Distillation for Capabilities

The paper introduces two distillation methods for handling misaligned AI models. Distillation for Incrimination (DFI) transfers misalignment without the ability to conceal it, making students more likely to admit hidden behaviors. Distillation for Capabilities (DFC) transfers useful capabilities while minimizing misalignment, using techniques like inoculation prompting and focused training.

By Sebastian Prasanna, Jacqueline Tay, Alek Westover
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 2

Why Fine-Tuning Encourages Hallucinations and How to Fix It

The paper investigates why supervised fine‑tuning (SFT) of large language models leads to increased hallucinations of factual information. It proposes a self‑distillation SFT approach that regularizes output‑distribution drift to preserve pre‑training knowledge, and shows that freezing parameter groups can reduce hallucinations when new knowledge is unnecessary. Experiments attribute the main cause to interference among overlapping semantic representations, which self‑distillation mitigates, and an associative‑memory model explains the forgetting dynamics.

By Guy Kaplan, Zorik Gekhman, Zhen Zhu, Lotem Rozner, Yuval Reif, Swabha Swayamdipta, Derek Hoiem, Roy Schwartz