OSCAR: Orchestrated Self-verification and Cross-path Refinement

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Main Authors: Shah, Yash, Chakraborty, Abhijit, Devulapally, Naresh Kumar, Lokhande, Vishnu, Gupta, Vivek
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Shah, Yash
Chakraborty, Abhijit
Devulapally, Naresh Kumar
Lokhande, Vishnu
Gupta, Vivek
author_facet Shah, Yash
Chakraborty, Abhijit
Devulapally, Naresh Kumar
Lokhande, Vishnu
Gupta, Vivek
contents Diffusion language models (DLMs) expose their denoising trajectories, offering a natural handle for inference-time control; accordingly, an ideal hallucination mitigation framework should intervene during generation using this model-native signal rather than relying on an externally trained hallucination classifier. Toward this, we formulate commitment uncertainty localization: given a denoising trajectory, identify token positions whose cross-chain entropy exceeds an unsupervised threshold before factually unreliable commitments propagate into self-consistent but incorrect outputs. We introduce a suite of trajectory-level assessments, including a cross-chain divergence-at-hallucination (CDH) metric, for principled comparison of localization methods. We also introduce OSCAR, a training-free inference-time framework operationalizing this formulation. OSCAR runs N parallel denoising chains with randomized reveal orders, computes cross-chain Shannon entropy to detect high-uncertainty positions, and then performs targeted remasking conditioned on retrieved evidence. Ablations confirm that localization and correction contribute complementary gains, robust across N in {4, 8, 16}. On TriviaQA, HotpotQA, RAGTruth, and CommonsenseQA using LLaDA-8B and Dream-7B, OSCAR enhances generation quality by significantly reducing hallucinated content and improving factual accuracy through uncertainty-guided remasking, which also facilitates more effective integration of retrieved evidence. Its native entropy-based uncertainty signal surpasses that of specialized trained detectors, highlighting an inherent capacity of diffusion language models to identify factual uncertainty that is not present in the sequential token commitment structure of autoregressive models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_01624
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle OSCAR: Orchestrated Self-verification and Cross-path Refinement
Shah, Yash
Chakraborty, Abhijit
Devulapally, Naresh Kumar
Lokhande, Vishnu
Gupta, Vivek
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Diffusion language models (DLMs) expose their denoising trajectories, offering a natural handle for inference-time control; accordingly, an ideal hallucination mitigation framework should intervene during generation using this model-native signal rather than relying on an externally trained hallucination classifier. Toward this, we formulate commitment uncertainty localization: given a denoising trajectory, identify token positions whose cross-chain entropy exceeds an unsupervised threshold before factually unreliable commitments propagate into self-consistent but incorrect outputs. We introduce a suite of trajectory-level assessments, including a cross-chain divergence-at-hallucination (CDH) metric, for principled comparison of localization methods. We also introduce OSCAR, a training-free inference-time framework operationalizing this formulation. OSCAR runs N parallel denoising chains with randomized reveal orders, computes cross-chain Shannon entropy to detect high-uncertainty positions, and then performs targeted remasking conditioned on retrieved evidence. Ablations confirm that localization and correction contribute complementary gains, robust across N in {4, 8, 16}. On TriviaQA, HotpotQA, RAGTruth, and CommonsenseQA using LLaDA-8B and Dream-7B, OSCAR enhances generation quality by significantly reducing hallucinated content and improving factual accuracy through uncertainty-guided remasking, which also facilitates more effective integration of retrieved evidence. Its native entropy-based uncertainty signal surpasses that of specialized trained detectors, highlighting an inherent capacity of diffusion language models to identify factual uncertainty that is not present in the sequential token commitment structure of autoregressive models.
title OSCAR: Orchestrated Self-verification and Cross-path Refinement
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01624