arXiv Machine Learning

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.

arXiv AI
Aug 5

UHP Detection: LVLMs have their Unique Hallucination Pattern in the Consistency Space

arXiv:2608. 03817v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large vision--language models (LVLMs) demonstrate strong multimodal reasoning capabilities but remain prone to hallucination, where model predictions are not grounded in visual evidence.

By Amir Mohammad Ezzati, Kiyan Rezaee, Bardiya Kariminia, Mohamad Amin Yousefi, Asal Mohammadjafari Mamaqani, Behrad Samimi, Mohammad Hossein Rohban
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 21

Gradient-Stable Attention Heads Signal LLM Correctness

The paper introduces HeadEntropy, a training‑free method that predicts the correctness of large language model (LLM) answers by measuring how stable each attention head’s pattern is to further gradient updates. By linking the trace of the softmax Jacobian to 2‑Renyi entropy, the authors show that attention spread correlates with gradient stability, enabling accurate hallucination detection without reference annotations. Across five instruction‑tuned LLMs and five diverse datasets—including medicine, multi‑hop reasoning, and mathematics—HeadEntropy achieves a 0.736 AUROC, outperforming other training‑free baselines and matching hidden‑state probes while incurring less than 1% of inference cost.

By Sophie Ostmeier, Brian Axelrod, Maya Varma, Asad Aali, Yabin Zhang, Magdalini Paschali, Sanmi Koyejo, Curtis Langlotz, Akshay Chaudhari
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 25

DynHD: Hallucination Detection for Diffusion Large Language Models via Denoising Dynamics Deviation Learning

DynHD is a method for detecting hallucinations in diffusion large language models (D‑LLMs) by focusing on token‑level uncertainty and its evolution during the denoising process. It introduces a semantic‑aware evidence construction module that filters out non‑informative structural tokens and highlights uncertainty in informative tokens, and a reference evidence generator that models the expected trajectory of uncertainty, enabling a deviation‑based detector to identify hallucinations. Experiments show DynHD outperforms existing baselines while being more efficient across various benchmarks and backbone models.

By Yanyu Qian, Yue Tan, Yixin Liu, Wang Yu, Shirui Pan
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