arXiv AI By Urja Pawar, Rajitha Ramanayake, Owen O'Neill, Nabeel Kemal, Abhishek Mandal, Houssem Chatbri, Christopher Martin

From Tokens to Semantics: Leveraging Complementary Signals for Hallucination Detection in Black-Box LLMs

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The paper investigates hallucination detection in black‑box large language models by leveraging two accessible signals: semantic entropy, which captures disagreement among sampled response meanings, and token‑level uncertainty derived from log‑probabilities. It introduces a TopK aggregation technique, a hybrid CoCoA method combining uncertainty with semantic dissimilarity, and two supervised approaches—Gated and Stacked—that integrate token and semantic features. Across seven benchmarks and four language models, the supervised Stacked method performs best in many cases, while TopK and CoCoA remain competitive without labeled data, though all methods require careful threshold calibration.

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