Scalable Token-Level Hallucination Detection in Large Language Models

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Main Authors: Min, Rui, Pang, Tianyu, Du, Chao, Cheng, Minhao, Fung, Yi R.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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_version_ 1866913118927454208
author Min, Rui
Pang, Tianyu
Du, Chao
Cheng, Minhao
Fung, Yi R.
author_facet Min, Rui
Pang, Tianyu
Du, Chao
Cheng, Minhao
Fung, Yi R.
contents Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, but they still frequently produce hallucinations. These hallucinations are difficult to detect in reasoning-intensive tasks, where the content appears coherent but contains errors like logical flaws and unreliable intermediate results. While step-level analysis is commonly used to detect internal hallucinations, it suffers from limited granularity and poor scalability due to its reliance on step segmentation. To address these limitations, we propose TokenHD, a holistic pipeline for training token-level hallucination detectors. Specifically, TokenHD consists of a scalable data engine for synthesizing large-scale hallucination annotations along with a training recipe featuring an importance-weighted strategy for robust model training. To systematically assess the detection performance, we also provide a rigorous evaluation protocol. Through training within TokenHD, our detector operates directly on free-form text to identify hallucinations, eliminating the need for predefined step segmentation or additional text reformatting. Our experiments show that even a small detector (0.6B) achieves substantial performance gains after training, surpassing much larger reasoning models (e.g., QwQ-32B), and detection performance scales consistently with model size from 0.6B to 8B. Finally, we show that our detector can generalize well across diverse practical scenarios and explore strategies to further enhance its cross-domain generalization capability.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_12384
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Scalable Token-Level Hallucination Detection in Large Language Models
Min, Rui
Pang, Tianyu
Du, Chao
Cheng, Minhao
Fung, Yi R.
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, but they still frequently produce hallucinations. These hallucinations are difficult to detect in reasoning-intensive tasks, where the content appears coherent but contains errors like logical flaws and unreliable intermediate results. While step-level analysis is commonly used to detect internal hallucinations, it suffers from limited granularity and poor scalability due to its reliance on step segmentation. To address these limitations, we propose TokenHD, a holistic pipeline for training token-level hallucination detectors. Specifically, TokenHD consists of a scalable data engine for synthesizing large-scale hallucination annotations along with a training recipe featuring an importance-weighted strategy for robust model training. To systematically assess the detection performance, we also provide a rigorous evaluation protocol. Through training within TokenHD, our detector operates directly on free-form text to identify hallucinations, eliminating the need for predefined step segmentation or additional text reformatting. Our experiments show that even a small detector (0.6B) achieves substantial performance gains after training, surpassing much larger reasoning models (e.g., QwQ-32B), and detection performance scales consistently with model size from 0.6B to 8B. Finally, we show that our detector can generalize well across diverse practical scenarios and explore strategies to further enhance its cross-domain generalization capability.
title Scalable Token-Level Hallucination Detection in Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.12384