@inproceedings{kim-etal-2025-detecting,
    title = "Detecting {LLM} Hallucination Through Layer-wise Information Deficiency: Analysis of Ambiguous Prompts and Unanswerable Questions",
    author = "Kim, Hazel  and
      Lamb, Tom A.  and
      Bibi, Adel  and
      Torr, Philip  and
      Gal, Yarin",
    editor = "Christodoulopoulos, Christos  and
      Chakraborty, Tanmoy  and
      Rose, Carolyn  and
      Peng, Violet",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
    month = nov,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Suzhou, China",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.1644/",
    pages = "32298--32310",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-332-6",
    abstract = "Large language models (LLMs) frequently generate confident yet inaccurate responses, introducing significant risks for deployment in safety-critical domains. We present a novel, test-time approach to detecting model hallucination through systematic analysis of information flow across model layers. We target cases when LLMs process inputs with ambiguous or insufficient context. Our investigation reveals that hallucination manifests as usable information deficiencies in inter-layer transmissions. While existing approaches primarily focus on final-layer output analysis, we demonstrate that tracking cross-layer information dynamics ($\mathcal{L}$I) provides robust indicators of model reliability, accounting for both information gain and loss during computation. I improves model reliability by immediately integrating with universal LLMs without additional training or architectural modifications."
}