Principled Detection of Hallucinations in Large Language Models via Multiple Testing

Abstract: While LLMs have emerged as powerful foundational models to solve a variety of tasks, they have also been shown to be prone to hallucinations, i.e., generating responses that sound confident but are actually incorrect or even nonsensical. In this work, we formulate the problem of detecting hallucinations as a hypothesis testing problem and draw parallels to the problem of out-of-distribution detection in machine learning models. We propose a multiple-testing-inspired method to solve the hallucination detection problem, and provide extensive experimental results to validate the robustness of our approach against state-of-the-art methods.