Does Finetuning with Scientific Data Increase Hallucinations? A Multi-domain Factuality Evaluation of LLMs
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arXiv:2603. 05308v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Assessing whether an article supports an assertion is essential for hallucination detection and claim verification.
The paper introduces REASONS, a benchmark comprising 12,723 sentence-level citation instances across 12 arXiv subject categories, to evaluate scientific citation attribution by large language models. It proposes a dual-metric framework—Abstention Rate (AR) and Hallucination Rate (HR)—to assess the trade-off between reliability and responsiveness. Experiments on proprietary and open-source LLMs under various prompting and retrieval settings show that advanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) reduces hallucinations but may increase abstention, while retrieval-augmented variants often maintain near-zero abstention. Human evaluation reveals a high ratio of factual hallucinations to acceptable paraphrases, underscoring the need for systems that can appropriately abstain under uncertainty.
The paper introduces BioCheck Agent, an LLM-based system that generates structured biomedical fact‑checking reports using agentic search and a reinforcement‑learning framework called EG‑GRPO. Unlike prior methods that output only supported or refuted labels, BioCheck Agent synthesizes conclusions with retrieved evidence from PubMed, employing advanced Boolean search operators. Experiments show that, compared to the base Qwen3.5‑4B model, BioCheck Agent improves label prediction accuracy on SciFact by 9.95 %, raises evidence quality by 3.7 %, and reduces hallucinations by 19.63 %.
arXiv:2602.11166v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods are widely used to adapt large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks and are often assume...
The paper introduces REASONS, a benchmark of 12,723 sentence-level citation instances across 12 arXiv subject categories, to evaluate scientific citation attribution under different evidence conditions. It proposes a dual-metric framework—Abstention Rate (AR) and Hallucination Rate (HR)—to balance reliability and responsiveness. Experiments with proprietary and open-source LLMs across various prompting and retrieval settings show that advanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) reduces hallucinations but increases abstention, while adversarial metadata can push hallucination rates above 85%. Human evaluation confirms a high ratio of factual hallucinations to acceptable paraphrases, underscoring the need for systems that can appropriately abstain under uncertainty.
HalluPeer is a new benchmark designed to detect hallucinations in scientific peer reviews. It provides aligned triples of paper content, human-written reviews, and hallucination-injected reviews, annotated for detection, classification, and localization. Experiments on 12K papers and 38K reviews show that existing detectors struggle to separate hallucinations from legitimate critique, and that HalluPeer-defined hallucination patterns occur in real peer reviews.