Stemming Hallucination in Language Models Using a Licensing Oracle

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Emanuilov, Simeon, Ackermann, Richard
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866918192245374976
author Emanuilov, Simeon
Ackermann, Richard
author_facet Emanuilov, Simeon
Ackermann, Richard
contents Language models exhibit remarkable natural language generation capabilities but remain prone to hallucinations, generating factually incorrect information despite producing syntactically coherent responses. This study introduces the Licensing Oracle, an architectural solution designed to stem hallucinations in LMs by enforcing truth constraints through formal validation against structured knowledge graphs. Unlike statistical approaches that rely on data scaling or fine-tuning, the Licensing Oracle embeds a deterministic validation step into the model's generative process, ensuring that only factually accurate claims are made. We evaluated the effectiveness of the Licensing Oracle through experiments comparing it with several state-of-the-art methods, including baseline language model generation, fine-tuning for factual recall, fine-tuning for abstention behavior, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Our results demonstrate that although RAG and fine-tuning improve performance, they fail to eliminate hallucinations. In contrast, the Licensing Oracle achieved perfect abstention precision (AP = 1.0) and zero false answers (FAR-NE = 0.0), ensuring that only valid claims were generated with 89.1% accuracy in factual responses. This work shows that architectural innovations, such as the Licensing Oracle, offer a necessary and sufficient solution for hallucinations in domains with structured knowledge representations, offering guarantees that statistical methods cannot match. Although the Licensing Oracle is specifically designed to address hallucinations in fact-based domains, its framework lays the groundwork for truth-constrained generation in future AI systems, providing a new path toward reliable, epistemically grounded models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_06073
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Stemming Hallucination in Language Models Using a Licensing Oracle
Emanuilov, Simeon
Ackermann, Richard
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Logic in Computer Science
68T50, 68T27, 03B70
I.2.7; I.2.4; H.3.3
Language models exhibit remarkable natural language generation capabilities but remain prone to hallucinations, generating factually incorrect information despite producing syntactically coherent responses. This study introduces the Licensing Oracle, an architectural solution designed to stem hallucinations in LMs by enforcing truth constraints through formal validation against structured knowledge graphs. Unlike statistical approaches that rely on data scaling or fine-tuning, the Licensing Oracle embeds a deterministic validation step into the model's generative process, ensuring that only factually accurate claims are made. We evaluated the effectiveness of the Licensing Oracle through experiments comparing it with several state-of-the-art methods, including baseline language model generation, fine-tuning for factual recall, fine-tuning for abstention behavior, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Our results demonstrate that although RAG and fine-tuning improve performance, they fail to eliminate hallucinations. In contrast, the Licensing Oracle achieved perfect abstention precision (AP = 1.0) and zero false answers (FAR-NE = 0.0), ensuring that only valid claims were generated with 89.1% accuracy in factual responses. This work shows that architectural innovations, such as the Licensing Oracle, offer a necessary and sufficient solution for hallucinations in domains with structured knowledge representations, offering guarantees that statistical methods cannot match. Although the Licensing Oracle is specifically designed to address hallucinations in fact-based domains, its framework lays the groundwork for truth-constrained generation in future AI systems, providing a new path toward reliable, epistemically grounded models.
title Stemming Hallucination in Language Models Using a Licensing Oracle
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Logic in Computer Science
68T50, 68T27, 03B70
I.2.7; I.2.4; H.3.3
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.06073