The paper investigates why large language models (LLMs) produce hallucinations—outputs that are fabricated, unverifiable, or contradictory to source material—and argues that these hallucinations have philosophical implications for machine consciousness. It reviews known causes such as source‑target divergence, training‑inference discrepancies, and overfitting, and presents two empirical studies: one showing that higher temperature settings in GPT models yield plausible but incorrect answers, while lower temperatures produce accurate ones; and another demonstrating that an encoder‑only model trained on encyclopedic data answers factually without embellishment, suggesting hallucinations arise from exposure to subjective, socially diverse data rather than cognitive ability. Drawing on Turing, Searle’s Chinese Room, the frame problem, and cybernetic theory, the authors contend that a model’s self‑reports of emotion or sentience fall within the definition of hallucination, implying that any future machine consciousness may remain epistemically inaccessible because it would be indistinguishable from an advanced hallucination.
By Kristina \v{S}ekrst
arXiv:2608. 19206v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Contemporary Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly aligned to suppress hallucinations, prioritizing factual retrieval over combinatorial creativity.
By Nicolas Rodriguez-Alvarez (IES Parquesol, Valladolid, Spain)
In 2026, we held the fourth iteration of the SHROOM Shared Task series: SHROOM-Visions (\textbf{S}hared-task on \textbf{H}allucinations and \textbf{R}elated \textbf{O}bservable \textbf{O}vergeneration...
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
arXiv:2606. 07521v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This study investigates the phenomenon of hallucinations in domain-adapted Large Language Models (LLMs), focusing on the fine-tuning of the Llama-2 model with the Lamini dataset.
By Sanchita Porwal, Sai Prasath S, Xingjian Bi, Madelyn Scandlen
arXiv:2603.18007v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: The study explores whether current Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit Theory of Mind (ToM) capabilities -- specifically, the ability to inf...
By Anna Babarczy, Andras Lukacs, Peter Vedres, Zeteny Bujka
arXiv:2510. 20091v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Creativity is often seen as a hallmark of human intelligence.
By Zhaoyi Joey Hou, Bowei Alvin Zhang, Yining Lu, Bhiman Kumar Baghel, Anneliese Brei, Ximing Lu, Meng Jiang, Faeze Brahman, Snigdha Chaturvedi, Haw-Shiuan Chang, Daniel Khashabi, Xiang Lorraine Li
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:2606. 07537v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models hallucinate--producing fluent, confident, factually wrong outputs--with a consistency that persists across generations and scales.
By Md. Rejaul Korim Sadi, Toufiqur Rahman Tasin, Golam Mostofa Naeem
arXiv:2606. 13977v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: "Integrative" solutions are widely praised but rarely defined: we lack an operational way to tell a genuine integration -- one that makes the world cheaper to describe -- from a tidy re-description.
By Yoshinori Nomura
arXiv:2605. 10574v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As artificial intelligence advances, models are not improving uniformly.
By Shray Mathur, J. Anibal Boscoboinik, Esther H. R. Tsai, Kevin G. Yager
arXiv:2512. 21577v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Despite numerous attempts at mitigation since the inception of language models, hallucinations remain a persistent problem even in today's frontier LLMs.
By Emmy Liu, Varun Gangal, Chelsea Zou, Michael Yu, Xiaoqi Huang, Alex Chang, Zhuofu Tao, Karan Singh, Sachin Kumar, Steven Y. Feng