Lookback Lens: Detecting and Mitigating Contextual Hallucinations in Large Language Models Using Only Attention Maps

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Chuang, Yung-Sung, Qiu, Linlu, Hsieh, Cheng-Yu, Krishna, Ranjay, Kim, Yoon, Glass, James
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Chuang, Yung-Sung
Qiu, Linlu
Hsieh, Cheng-Yu
Krishna, Ranjay
Kim, Yoon
Glass, James
author_facet Chuang, Yung-Sung
Qiu, Linlu
Hsieh, Cheng-Yu
Krishna, Ranjay
Kim, Yoon
Glass, James
contents When asked to summarize articles or answer questions given a passage, large language models (LLMs) can hallucinate details and respond with unsubstantiated answers that are inaccurate with respect to the input context. This paper describes a simple approach for detecting such contextual hallucinations. We hypothesize that contextual hallucinations are related to the extent to which an LLM attends to information in the provided context versus its own generations. Based on this intuition, we propose a simple hallucination detection model whose input features are given by the ratio of attention weights on the context versus newly generated tokens (for each attention head). We find that a linear classifier based on these lookback ratio features is as effective as a richer detector that utilizes the entire hidden states of an LLM or a text-based entailment model. The lookback ratio-based detector -- Lookback Lens -- is found to transfer across tasks and even models, allowing a detector that is trained on a 7B model to be applied (without retraining) to a larger 13B model. We further apply this detector to mitigate contextual hallucinations, and find that a simple classifier-guided decoding approach is able to reduce the amount of hallucination, for example by 9.6% in the XSum summarization task.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_07071
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Lookback Lens: Detecting and Mitigating Contextual Hallucinations in Large Language Models Using Only Attention Maps
Chuang, Yung-Sung
Qiu, Linlu
Hsieh, Cheng-Yu
Krishna, Ranjay
Kim, Yoon
Glass, James
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
When asked to summarize articles or answer questions given a passage, large language models (LLMs) can hallucinate details and respond with unsubstantiated answers that are inaccurate with respect to the input context. This paper describes a simple approach for detecting such contextual hallucinations. We hypothesize that contextual hallucinations are related to the extent to which an LLM attends to information in the provided context versus its own generations. Based on this intuition, we propose a simple hallucination detection model whose input features are given by the ratio of attention weights on the context versus newly generated tokens (for each attention head). We find that a linear classifier based on these lookback ratio features is as effective as a richer detector that utilizes the entire hidden states of an LLM or a text-based entailment model. The lookback ratio-based detector -- Lookback Lens -- is found to transfer across tasks and even models, allowing a detector that is trained on a 7B model to be applied (without retraining) to a larger 13B model. We further apply this detector to mitigate contextual hallucinations, and find that a simple classifier-guided decoding approach is able to reduce the amount of hallucination, for example by 9.6% in the XSum summarization task.
title Lookback Lens: Detecting and Mitigating Contextual Hallucinations in Large Language Models Using Only Attention Maps
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.07071