Beyond ROUGE: N-Gram Subspace Features for LLM Hallucination Detection

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Li, Jerry, Papalexakis, Evangelos
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Li, Jerry
Papalexakis, Evangelos
author_facet Li, Jerry
Papalexakis, Evangelos
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated effectiveness across a wide variety of tasks involving natural language, however, a fundamental problem of hallucinations still plagues these models, limiting their trustworthiness in generating consistent, truthful information. Detecting hallucinations has quickly become an important topic, with various methods such as uncertainty estimation, LLM Judges, retrieval augmented generation (RAG), and consistency checks showing promise. Many of these methods build upon foundational metrics, such as ROUGE, BERTScore, or Perplexity, which often lack the semantic depth necessary to detect hallucinations effectively. In this work, we propose a novel approach inspired by ROUGE that constructs an N-Gram frequency tensor from LLM-generated text. This tensor captures richer semantic structure by encoding co-occurrence patterns, enabling better differentiation between factual and hallucinated content. We demonstrate this by applying tensor decomposition methods to extract singular values from each mode and use these as input features to train a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) binary classifier for hallucinations. Our method is evaluated on the HaluEval dataset and demonstrates significant improvements over traditional baselines, as well as competitive performance against state-of-the-art LLM judges.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_05360
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Beyond ROUGE: N-Gram Subspace Features for LLM Hallucination Detection
Li, Jerry
Papalexakis, Evangelos
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated effectiveness across a wide variety of tasks involving natural language, however, a fundamental problem of hallucinations still plagues these models, limiting their trustworthiness in generating consistent, truthful information. Detecting hallucinations has quickly become an important topic, with various methods such as uncertainty estimation, LLM Judges, retrieval augmented generation (RAG), and consistency checks showing promise. Many of these methods build upon foundational metrics, such as ROUGE, BERTScore, or Perplexity, which often lack the semantic depth necessary to detect hallucinations effectively. In this work, we propose a novel approach inspired by ROUGE that constructs an N-Gram frequency tensor from LLM-generated text. This tensor captures richer semantic structure by encoding co-occurrence patterns, enabling better differentiation between factual and hallucinated content. We demonstrate this by applying tensor decomposition methods to extract singular values from each mode and use these as input features to train a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) binary classifier for hallucinations. Our method is evaluated on the HaluEval dataset and demonstrates significant improvements over traditional baselines, as well as competitive performance against state-of-the-art LLM judges.
title Beyond ROUGE: N-Gram Subspace Features for LLM Hallucination Detection
topic Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05360