Cleanse: Uncertainty Estimation Approach Using Clustering-based Semantic Consistency in LLMs

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Hauptverfasser: Joo, Minsuh, Cho, Hyunsoo
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Joo, Minsuh
Cho, Hyunsoo
author_facet Joo, Minsuh
Cho, Hyunsoo
contents Despite the outstanding performance of large language models (LLMs) across various NLP tasks, hallucinations in LLMs--where LLMs generate inaccurate responses--remains as a critical problem as it can be directly connected to a crisis of building safe and reliable LLMs. Uncertainty estimation is primarily used to measure hallucination levels in LLM responses so that correct and incorrect answers can be distinguished clearly. This study proposes an effective uncertainty estimation approach, \textbf{Cl}ust\textbf{e}ring-based sem\textbf{an}tic con\textbf{s}ist\textbf{e}ncy (\textbf{Cleanse}). Cleanse quantifies the uncertainty with the proportion of the intra-cluster consistency in the total consistency between LLM hidden embeddings which contain adequate semantic information of generations, by employing clustering. The effectiveness of Cleanse for detecting hallucination is validated using four off-the-shelf models, LLaMA-7B, LLaMA-13B, LLaMA2-7B and Mistral-7B and two question-answering benchmarks, SQuAD and CoQA.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_14649
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Cleanse: Uncertainty Estimation Approach Using Clustering-based Semantic Consistency in LLMs
Joo, Minsuh
Cho, Hyunsoo
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Despite the outstanding performance of large language models (LLMs) across various NLP tasks, hallucinations in LLMs--where LLMs generate inaccurate responses--remains as a critical problem as it can be directly connected to a crisis of building safe and reliable LLMs. Uncertainty estimation is primarily used to measure hallucination levels in LLM responses so that correct and incorrect answers can be distinguished clearly. This study proposes an effective uncertainty estimation approach, \textbf{Cl}ust\textbf{e}ring-based sem\textbf{an}tic con\textbf{s}ist\textbf{e}ncy (\textbf{Cleanse}). Cleanse quantifies the uncertainty with the proportion of the intra-cluster consistency in the total consistency between LLM hidden embeddings which contain adequate semantic information of generations, by employing clustering. The effectiveness of Cleanse for detecting hallucination is validated using four off-the-shelf models, LLaMA-7B, LLaMA-13B, LLaMA2-7B and Mistral-7B and two question-answering benchmarks, SQuAD and CoQA.
title Cleanse: Uncertainty Estimation Approach Using Clustering-based Semantic Consistency in LLMs
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14649