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Unfamiliar Finetuning Examples Control How Language Models Hallucinate

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arxiv 2403.05612 v2 pith:SLHYX3PC submitted 2024-03-08 cs.LG cs.AIcs.CL

classification cs.LGcs.AIcs.CL
keywords finetuningmodelsunfamiliarmodelexampleshallucinaterewardfactuality
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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Large language models are known to hallucinate when faced with unfamiliar queries, but the underlying mechanism that govern how models hallucinate are not yet fully understood. In this work, we find that unfamiliar examples in the models' finetuning data -- those that introduce concepts beyond the base model's scope of knowledge -- are crucial in shaping these errors. In particular, we find that an LLM's hallucinated predictions tend to mirror the responses associated with its unfamiliar finetuning examples. This suggests that by modifying how unfamiliar finetuning examples are supervised, we can influence a model's responses to unfamiliar queries (e.g., say ``I don't know''). We empirically validate this observation in a series of controlled experiments involving SFT, RL, and reward model finetuning on TriviaQA and MMLU. Our work further investigates RL finetuning strategies for improving the factuality of long-form model generations. We find that, while hallucinations from the reward model can significantly undermine the effectiveness of RL factuality finetuning, strategically controlling how reward models hallucinate can minimize these negative effects. Leveraging our previous observations on controlling hallucinations, we propose an approach for learning more reliable reward models, and show that they improve the efficacy of RL factuality finetuning in long-form biography and book/movie plot generation tasks.

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Forward citations

Cited by 6 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Learning Facts at Scale with Active Reading

    cs.CL 2025-08 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Training LLMs on self-generated, diverse 'active reading' materials improves factual recall by 160-312% and scales to a 1T-token Wikipedia expert model.

  2. Exploring the Challenges and Opportunities of AI-assisted Codebase Generation

    cs.SE 2025-08 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Developers prompting codebase-level AI assistants are often dissatisfied with generated code, citing missing functionality, poor code quality, and communication gaps, despite varied prompting strategies.

  3. Stochastic Chameleons: Irrelevant Context Hallucinations Reveal Class-Based (Mis)Generalization in LLMs

    cs.CL 2025-05 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    LLMs systematically combine abstract category cues from a query with features from irrelevant context, causing structured answer flips, a behavior the authors call class-based (mis)generalization.

  4. GRAIT: Gradient-Driven Refusal-Aware Instruction Tuning for Effective Hallucination Mitigation

    cs.CL 2025-02 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    GRAIT selects and reweights refusal-training examples using gradient influence, reporting lower hallucination rates and better helpfulness scores than prior refusal-aware tuning baselines.

  5. Connections between reinforcement learning with feedback,test-time scaling, and diffusion guidance: An anthology

    stat.ML 2025-09 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    RLHF, RLIF, and soft best-of-N sampling reduce to the same exponential-tilting objective under parameter matching, and test-time scaling can asymptotically implement classifier-free diffusion guidance.

  6. A Survey on Proactive Defense Strategies Against Misinformation in Large Language Models

    cs.IR 2025-07 reject novelty 3.0 of 10

    A survey claims proactive defenses against LLM misinformation outperform post-hoc detection by up to 63%, but no meta-analysis details are provided to support the claim.

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