The Troubling Emergence of Hallucination in Large Language Models - An Extensive Definition, Quantification, and Prescriptive Remediations
Vipula Rawte, Swagata Chakraborty, Agnibh Pathak, Anubhav Sarkar, S.M Towhidul Islam Tonmoy, Aman Chadha, Amit Sheth, Amitava Das
Abstract
The recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have garnered widespread acclaim for their remarkable emerging capabilities. However, the issue of hallucination has parallelly emerged as a by-product, posing significant concerns. While some recent endeavors have been made to identify and mitigate different types of hallucination, there has been a limited emphasis on the nuanced categorization of hallucination and associated mitigation methods. To address this gap, we offer a fine-grained discourse on profiling hallucination based on its degree, orientation, and category, along with offering strategies for alleviation. As such, we define two overarching orientations of hallucination: (i) factual mirage (FM) and (ii) silver lining (SL). To provide a more comprehensive understanding, both orientations are further sub-categorized into intrinsic and extrinsic, with three degrees of severity - (i) mild, (ii) moderate, and (iii) alarming. We also meticulously categorize hallucination into six types: (i) acronym ambiguity, (ii) numeric nuisance, (iii) generated golem, (iv) virtual voice, (v) geographic erratum, and (vi) time wrap. Furthermore, we curate HallucInation eLiciTation (HILT), a publicly available dataset comprising of 75,000 samples generated using 15 contemporary LLMs along with human annotations for the aforementioned categories. Finally, to establish a method for quantifying and to offer a comparative spectrum that allows us to evaluate and rank LLMs based on their vulnerability to producing hallucinations, we propose Hallucination Vulnerability Index (HVI). Amidst the extensive deliberations on policy-making for regulating AI development, it is of utmost importance to assess and measure which LLM is more vulnerable towards hallucination. We firmly believe that HVI holds significant value as a tool for the wider NLP community, with the potential to serve as a rubric in AI-related policy-making. In conclusion, we propose two solution strategies for mitigating hallucinations.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.emnlp-main.155
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
- Month:
- December
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Singapore
- Editors:
- Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
- Venue:
- EMNLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 2541–2573
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.155
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.155
- Cite (ACL):
- Vipula Rawte, Swagata Chakraborty, Agnibh Pathak, Anubhav Sarkar, S.M Towhidul Islam Tonmoy, Aman Chadha, Amit Sheth, and Amitava Das. 2023. The Troubling Emergence of Hallucination in Large Language Models - An Extensive Definition, Quantification, and Prescriptive Remediations. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 2541–2573, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- The Troubling Emergence of Hallucination in Large Language Models - An Extensive Definition, Quantification, and Prescriptive Remediations (Rawte et al., EMNLP 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/proper-vol2-ingestion/2023.emnlp-main.155.pdf