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A Stitch in Time Saves Nine: Detecting and Mitigating Hallucinations of LLMs by Validating Low-Confidence Generation

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arxiv 2307.03987 v2 pith:OYPT5ZJO submitted 2023-07-08 cs.CL

classification cs.CL
keywords hallucinationsgenerationmitigationapproachdetecteddetectionmodelmodels
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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Recently developed large language models have achieved remarkable success in generating fluent and coherent text. However, these models often tend to 'hallucinate' which critically hampers their reliability. In this work, we address this crucial problem and propose an approach that actively detects and mitigates hallucinations during the generation process. Specifically, we first identify the candidates of potential hallucination leveraging the model's logit output values, check their correctness through a validation procedure, mitigate the detected hallucinations, and then continue with the generation process. Through extensive experiments with GPT-3.5 (text-davinci-003) on the 'article generation task', we first demonstrate the individual efficacy of our detection and mitigation techniques. Specifically, the detection technique achieves a recall of ~88% and the mitigation technique successfully mitigates 57.6% of the correctly detected hallucinations. Importantly, our mitigation technique does not introduce new hallucinations even in the case of incorrectly detected hallucinations, i.e., false positives. Then, we show that the proposed active detection and mitigation approach successfully reduces the hallucinations of the GPT-3.5 model from 47.5% to 14.5% on average. We further demonstrate the effectiveness and wide applicability of our approach through additional studies including performance on different types of questions (multi-hop and false premise questions) and with another LLM from a different model family (Vicuna). In summary, our work contributes to improving the reliability and trustworthiness of large language models, a crucial step en route to enabling their widespread adoption in real-world applications.

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Cited by 20 Pith papers

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  3. Reasoning Denoiser: Denoising Reasoning Traces for Hallucination Detection in Large Reasoning Models

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  4. When Should LLMs Be Less Specific? Selective Abstraction for Reliable Long-Form Text Generation

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  5. Geometry-Aware Hallucination Detection in Large Language Models

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  6. Neural Message-Passing on Attention Graphs for Hallucination Detection

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  18. Counterfactual Probing for Hallucination Detection and Mitigation in Large Language Models

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    Counterfactual Probing detects LLM hallucinations by measuring how much a model's confidence changes when a claim is altered to a plausible but incorrect variant, then hedges flagged statements with template-based mit...

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  20. Building Task Bots with Self-learning for Enhanced Adaptability, Extensibility, and Factuality

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