arXiv AI
Jul 15

Critic Experience Bank: Self-Evolving Step-Level Confidence Estimation for LLM Agents

arXiv:2607. 12397v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents act in external environments where each action changes the state that later decisions condition on, and where a single wrong step can waste interaction budget or trigger irreversible side effects long before the final failure is observed.

By Yaopei Zeng, Congchao Wang, JianHang Chen, Nan Wang, Yurui Chang, Lu Lin
arXiv AI
Sep 15

Look Before You Leap: Factual Decoding with Internal Attribution Signals

The paper introduces DescaPE, a decoding framework that uses internal model signals to reduce hallucinations in large language models. By identifying a factual‑salient layer span and training a lightweight probe to approximate its signal, DescaPE penalizes high‑risk continuations and rewards factually grounded ones during inference. Experiments on five factuality benchmarks across three LLMs show that DescaPE improves factuality with only a 1.10× latency overhead.

By Hayeong Ryu, JungMin Yun, Byeonggeuk Lim, Sunhee Jo, YoungBin Kim
arXiv AI
6d ago

Programs-of-Layers in LLMs through the Lens of Cortical Areas

The paper examines a method called Program-of-Layers (PoLar) that allows transformer layers to be dynamically routed rather than processed in a fixed sequence, mirroring the brain’s thalamic routing. Reproductions across five models confirm that skipping, repeating, and combining layer blocks improve performance, with shorter programs for easier inputs and more repeats for harder ones. However, the study could not replicate the claimed advantage of a learned single‑shot router, noting that its top prediction defaults to the standard pass while the top‑k predictions still yield accuracy gains. The authors also analyze the robustness of correction programs, finding them brittle to single edits, and release their code publicly.

By Justus Westerhoff, Stephan Olbrich, Hatem Oraby, Matthew Evan Larkum, Felix Alexander Gers
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

Domain-Specific Hallucination Detection in Large Language Models

The paper introduces a multi‑signal pipeline for detecting hallucinations in large language models, combining fine‑tuned DeBERTa‑v3 classification, Monte Carlo Dropout uncertainty, and temperature‑scaled calibration. On the HaluEval benchmark it achieves high performance (F1 = 0.915, AUROC = 0.977) across QA, summarization, and dialogue, and shows that 25 % of training data yields 77 % of full‑data performance. The authors also demonstrate that applying Direct Preference Optimization to a Qwen2.5‑0.5B generator cuts hallucination rates from 85.5 % to 37.7 %, and that domain‑specific fine‑tuning (PubMedBERT on SciFact) outperforms general‑domain models for biomedical text.

By Varun Teja Chundru, Debasmita Biswas