Mutual Information Alleviates Hallucinations in Abstractive Summarization

Abstract: Despite significant progress in the quality of language generated from abstractive summarization models, these models still exhibit the tendency to hallucinate, i.e., output content not supported by the source document. A number of works have tried to fix--or at least uncover the source of--the problem with limited success. In this paper, we identify a simple criterion under which models are significantly more likely to assign more probability to hallucinated content during generation: high model uncertainty. This finding offers a potential explanation for hallucinations: models default to favoring text with high marginal probability, i.e., high-frequency occurrences in the training set, when uncertain about a continuation. It also motivates possible routes for real-time intervention during decoding to prevent such hallucinations. We propose a decoding strategy that switches to optimizing for pointwise mutual information of the source and target token--rather than purely the probability of the target token--when the model exhibits uncertainty. Experiments on the XSum dataset show that our method decreases the probability of hallucinated tokens while maintaining the Rouge and BertS scores of top-performing decoding strategies.