InterrogateLLM: Zero-Resource Hallucination Detection in LLM-Generated Answers

Yakir Yehuda, Itzik Malkiel, Oren Barkan, Jonathan Weill, Royi Ronen, Noam Koenigstein


Abstract
Despite the many advances of Large Language Models (LLMs) and their unprecedented rapid evolution, their impact and integration into every facet of our daily lives is limited due to various reasons. One critical factor hindering their widespread adoption is the occurrence of hallucinations, where LLMs invent answers that sound realistic, yet drift away from factual truth. In this paper, we present a novel method for detecting hallucinations in large language models, which tackles a critical issue in the adoption of these models in various real-world scenarios. Through extensive evaluations across multiple datasets and LLMs, including Llama-2, we study the hallucination levels of various recent LLMs and demonstrate the effectiveness of our method to automatically detect them. Notably, we observe up to 87% hallucinations for Llama-2 in a specific experiment, where our method achieves a Balanced Accuracy of 81%, all without relying on external knowledge.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.506
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9333–9347
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.506
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yakir Yehuda, Itzik Malkiel, Oren Barkan, Jonathan Weill, Royi Ronen, and Noam Koenigstein. 2024. InterrogateLLM: Zero-Resource Hallucination Detection in LLM-Generated Answers. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 9333–9347, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
InterrogateLLM: Zero-Resource Hallucination Detection in LLM-Generated Answers (Yehuda et al., ACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.acl-long.506.pdf