LLM Internal States Reveal Hallucination Risk Faced With a Query

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ji, Ziwei, Chen, Delong, Ishii, Etsuko, Cahyawijaya, Samuel, Bang, Yejin, Wilie, Bryan, Fung, Pascale
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Ji, Ziwei
Chen, Delong
Ishii, Etsuko
Cahyawijaya, Samuel
Bang, Yejin
Wilie, Bryan
Fung, Pascale
author_facet Ji, Ziwei
Chen, Delong
Ishii, Etsuko
Cahyawijaya, Samuel
Bang, Yejin
Wilie, Bryan
Fung, Pascale
contents The hallucination problem of Large Language Models (LLMs) significantly limits their reliability and trustworthiness. Humans have a self-awareness process that allows us to recognize what we don't know when faced with queries. Inspired by this, our paper investigates whether LLMs can estimate their own hallucination risk before response generation. We analyze the internal mechanisms of LLMs broadly both in terms of training data sources and across 15 diverse Natural Language Generation (NLG) tasks, spanning over 700 datasets. Our empirical analysis reveals two key insights: (1) LLM internal states indicate whether they have seen the query in training data or not; and (2) LLM internal states show they are likely to hallucinate or not regarding the query. Our study explores particular neurons, activation layers, and tokens that play a crucial role in the LLM perception of uncertainty and hallucination risk. By a probing estimator, we leverage LLM self-assessment, achieving an average hallucination estimation accuracy of 84.32\% at run time.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_03282
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LLM Internal States Reveal Hallucination Risk Faced With a Query
Ji, Ziwei
Chen, Delong
Ishii, Etsuko
Cahyawijaya, Samuel
Bang, Yejin
Wilie, Bryan
Fung, Pascale
Computation and Language
The hallucination problem of Large Language Models (LLMs) significantly limits their reliability and trustworthiness. Humans have a self-awareness process that allows us to recognize what we don't know when faced with queries. Inspired by this, our paper investigates whether LLMs can estimate their own hallucination risk before response generation. We analyze the internal mechanisms of LLMs broadly both in terms of training data sources and across 15 diverse Natural Language Generation (NLG) tasks, spanning over 700 datasets. Our empirical analysis reveals two key insights: (1) LLM internal states indicate whether they have seen the query in training data or not; and (2) LLM internal states show they are likely to hallucinate or not regarding the query. Our study explores particular neurons, activation layers, and tokens that play a crucial role in the LLM perception of uncertainty and hallucination risk. By a probing estimator, we leverage LLM self-assessment, achieving an average hallucination estimation accuracy of 84.32\% at run time.
title LLM Internal States Reveal Hallucination Risk Faced With a Query
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.03282