@inproceedings{wang-etal-2026-lafact,
    title = "{LAF}a{CT}: Attribution-based Localization and Focused Sequential Analysis of Fact-Critical Tokens for Hallucination Detection",
    author = "Wang, Xin  and
      Li, Jiahao  and
      Zhang, Licheng  and
      Mao, Zhendong",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.312/",
    pages = "6877--6896",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
    abstract = "Large Language Models (LLMs) suffer from hallucinations, severely undermining their reliability. While white-box hallucination detection methods that leverage hidden states prevail, they fail to identify and focus on fact-critical information when analyzing token sequences. To address this, we propose LAFaCT, a Localize-then-Analyze detection framework. It first localizes fact-critical tokens using Factual Criticality, a novel metric derived from feature attribution. A subsequent stage then performs a focused sequential analysis on their hidden states. Extensive experiments on eight benchmarks and multiple model families confirm LAFaCT as the new state-of-the-art, with in-depth analyses validating the effectiveness of its core token-localization strategy."
}