Byeongho Yu
2025
PruneCD: Contrasting Pruned Self Model to Improve Decoding Factuality
Byeongho Yu
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Changhun Lee
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Jun-gyu Jin
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Eunhyeok Park
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
To mitigate the hallucination problem in large language models, DoLa exploits early exit logits from the same model as a contrastive prior. However, we found that these early exit logits tend to be flat, low in magnitude, and fail to reflect meaningful contrasts. To address this, we propose PruneCD, a novel contrastive decoding method that constructs the amateur model via layer pruning rather than early exit. This design leads to more informative and well-aligned logits, enabling more effective contrastive decoding. Through qualitative and quantitative analyses, we demonstrate that PruneCD consistently improves factuality with minimal inference overhead, offering a robust and practical approach to mitigating hallucinations in LLMs.