Gengwang Li
2026
The Digital Dunning-Kruger Effect: Decoupling Hallucinations via Geometric Hidden-state Observation for Semantic Truthfulness
Yueheng Mao | Min Yu | Gengwang Li | Jianguo Jiang | Gang Li | Meng Zhang | Zhen Xu | Weiqing Huang | Ming Liu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Yueheng Mao | Min Yu | Gengwang Li | Jianguo Jiang | Gang Li | Meng Zhang | Zhen Xu | Weiqing Huang | Ming Liu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Large Language Models (LLMs) often generate overconfident yet factually incorrect hallucinations. Current detection paradigms suffer from a trade-off between the high accuracy of computationally expensive black-box methods and the inability of white-box methods to detect stubborn hallucinations. To bridge this gap, we propose GHOST (Geometric Hidden-state Observation for Semantic Truthfulness), an efficient white-box framework for hallucination detection in LLMs. We primarily target confused hallucinations marked by internal reasoning instability, while also capturing stubborn hallucinations characterized by premature layer-wise convergence as a complementary signal. By integrating internal geometric dynamics with output probability distributions, GHOST constructs a high-dimensional feature space for non-linear truthfulness classification. Extensive evaluations on FinanceBench, RAGTruth, HaluEval, and PopQA show that GHOST outperforms white-box baselines and achieves competitive black-box performance while reducing computational overhead by over 90%, offering a robust solution for real-time detection.