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Auteurs principaux: Zhang, Jianxiong, Guo, Bing, Jiang, Yuming, Wang, Haobo, An, Bo, Du, Sean
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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Accès en ligne:https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.17467
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author Zhang, Jianxiong
Guo, Bing
Jiang, Yuming
Wang, Haobo
An, Bo
Du, Sean
author_facet Zhang, Jianxiong
Guo, Bing
Jiang, Yuming
Wang, Haobo
An, Bo
Du, Sean
contents Large reasoning models (LRMs) often generate long, seemingly coherent reasoning traces yet still produce incorrect answers, making hallucination detection challenging. Although trajectories contain useful signals, directly using trace text or vanilla hidden states for detection is brittle: traces vary in form and detectors can overfit to superficial patterns rather than answer validity. We introduce Answer-agreement Representation Shaping (ARS), which learns detection-friendly trace-conditioned representations by explicitly encoding answer stability. ARS generates counterfactual answers through small latent interventions, specifically, perturbing the trace-boundary embedding, and labels each perturbation by whether the resulting answer agrees with the original. It then learns representations that bring answer-agreeing states together and separate answer-disagreeing ones, exposing latent instability indicative of hallucination risk. The shaped embeddings are plug-and-play with existing embedding-based detectors and require no human annotations during training. Experiments demonstrate that ARS consistently improves detection and achieves substantial gains over strong baselines. Code is available at: https://github.com/radiolab-ntu/ars_icml2026.
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spellingShingle Harnessing Reasoning Trajectories for Hallucination Detection via Answer-agreement Representation Shaping
Zhang, Jianxiong
Guo, Bing
Jiang, Yuming
Wang, Haobo
An, Bo
Du, Sean
Machine Learning
Large reasoning models (LRMs) often generate long, seemingly coherent reasoning traces yet still produce incorrect answers, making hallucination detection challenging. Although trajectories contain useful signals, directly using trace text or vanilla hidden states for detection is brittle: traces vary in form and detectors can overfit to superficial patterns rather than answer validity. We introduce Answer-agreement Representation Shaping (ARS), which learns detection-friendly trace-conditioned representations by explicitly encoding answer stability. ARS generates counterfactual answers through small latent interventions, specifically, perturbing the trace-boundary embedding, and labels each perturbation by whether the resulting answer agrees with the original. It then learns representations that bring answer-agreeing states together and separate answer-disagreeing ones, exposing latent instability indicative of hallucination risk. The shaped embeddings are plug-and-play with existing embedding-based detectors and require no human annotations during training. Experiments demonstrate that ARS consistently improves detection and achieves substantial gains over strong baselines. Code is available at: https://github.com/radiolab-ntu/ars_icml2026.
title Harnessing Reasoning Trajectories for Hallucination Detection via Answer-agreement Representation Shaping
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.17467