Unsupervised Hallucination Detection by Inspecting Reasoning Processes

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Srey, Ponhvoan, Wu, Xiaobao, Luu, Anh Tuan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Srey, Ponhvoan
Wu, Xiaobao
Luu, Anh Tuan
author_facet Srey, Ponhvoan
Wu, Xiaobao
Luu, Anh Tuan
contents Unsupervised hallucination detection aims to identify hallucinated content generated by large language models (LLMs) without relying on labeled data. While unsupervised methods have gained popularity by eliminating labor-intensive human annotations, they frequently rely on proxy signals unrelated to factual correctness. This misalignment biases detection probes toward superficial or non-truth-related aspects, limiting generalizability across datasets and scenarios. To overcome these limitations, we propose IRIS, an unsupervised hallucination detection framework, leveraging internal representations intrinsic to factual correctness. IRIS prompts the LLM to carefully verify the truthfulness of a given statement, and obtain its contextualized embedding as informative features for training. Meanwhile, the uncertainty of each response is considered a soft pseudolabel for truthfulness. Experimental results demonstrate that IRIS consistently outperforms existing unsupervised methods. Our approach is fully unsupervised, computationally low cost, and works well even with few training data, making it suitable for real-time detection.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_10004
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Unsupervised Hallucination Detection by Inspecting Reasoning Processes
Srey, Ponhvoan
Wu, Xiaobao
Luu, Anh Tuan
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Unsupervised hallucination detection aims to identify hallucinated content generated by large language models (LLMs) without relying on labeled data. While unsupervised methods have gained popularity by eliminating labor-intensive human annotations, they frequently rely on proxy signals unrelated to factual correctness. This misalignment biases detection probes toward superficial or non-truth-related aspects, limiting generalizability across datasets and scenarios. To overcome these limitations, we propose IRIS, an unsupervised hallucination detection framework, leveraging internal representations intrinsic to factual correctness. IRIS prompts the LLM to carefully verify the truthfulness of a given statement, and obtain its contextualized embedding as informative features for training. Meanwhile, the uncertainty of each response is considered a soft pseudolabel for truthfulness. Experimental results demonstrate that IRIS consistently outperforms existing unsupervised methods. Our approach is fully unsupervised, computationally low cost, and works well even with few training data, making it suitable for real-time detection.
title Unsupervised Hallucination Detection by Inspecting Reasoning Processes
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10004