Consistency Is the Key: Detecting Hallucinations in LLM Generated Text By Checking Inconsistencies About Key Facts

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Gupta, Raavi, Panicker, Pranav Hari, Bhatia, Sumit, Ramakrishnan, Ganesh
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866911267861561344
author Gupta, Raavi
Panicker, Pranav Hari
Bhatia, Sumit
Ramakrishnan, Ganesh
author_facet Gupta, Raavi
Panicker, Pranav Hari
Bhatia, Sumit
Ramakrishnan, Ganesh
contents Large language models (LLMs), despite their remarkable text generation capabilities, often hallucinate and generate text that is factually incorrect and not grounded in real-world knowledge. This poses serious risks in domains like healthcare, finance, and customer support. A typical way to use LLMs is via the APIs provided by LLM vendors where there is no access to model weights or options to fine-tune the model. Existing methods to detect hallucinations in such settings where the model access is restricted or constrained by resources typically require making multiple LLM API calls, increasing latency and API cost. We introduce CONFACTCHECK, an efficient hallucination detection approach that does not leverage any external knowledge base and works on the simple intuition that responses to factual probes within the generated text should be consistent within a single LLM and across different LLMs. Rigorous empirical evaluation on multiple datasets that cover both the generation of factual texts and the open generation shows that CONFACTCHECK can detect hallucinated facts efficiently using fewer resources and achieves higher accuracy scores compared to existing baselines that operate under similar conditions. Our code is available here.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_12236
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Consistency Is the Key: Detecting Hallucinations in LLM Generated Text By Checking Inconsistencies About Key Facts
Gupta, Raavi
Panicker, Pranav Hari
Bhatia, Sumit
Ramakrishnan, Ganesh
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Large language models (LLMs), despite their remarkable text generation capabilities, often hallucinate and generate text that is factually incorrect and not grounded in real-world knowledge. This poses serious risks in domains like healthcare, finance, and customer support. A typical way to use LLMs is via the APIs provided by LLM vendors where there is no access to model weights or options to fine-tune the model. Existing methods to detect hallucinations in such settings where the model access is restricted or constrained by resources typically require making multiple LLM API calls, increasing latency and API cost. We introduce CONFACTCHECK, an efficient hallucination detection approach that does not leverage any external knowledge base and works on the simple intuition that responses to factual probes within the generated text should be consistent within a single LLM and across different LLMs. Rigorous empirical evaluation on multiple datasets that cover both the generation of factual texts and the open generation shows that CONFACTCHECK can detect hallucinated facts efficiently using fewer resources and achieves higher accuracy scores compared to existing baselines that operate under similar conditions. Our code is available here.
title Consistency Is the Key: Detecting Hallucinations in LLM Generated Text By Checking Inconsistencies About Key Facts
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.12236