The Digital Dunning-Kruger Effect: Decoupling Hallucinations via Geometric Hidden-state Observation for Semantic Truthfulness
Yueheng Mao, Min Yu Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Gengwang Li Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Jianguo Jiang Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Gang Li Deakin University, Meng Zhang, Zhen Xu, Weiqing Huang Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences 等 9 位作者
Large Language Models (LLMs) often generate overconfident yet factually incorrect hallucinations. Current detection paradigms suffer from a trade-off between the high accuracy of computationally expensive black-box methods and the inability of white-box methods to detect stubborn hallucinations. To bridge this gap, we propose GHOST (Geometric Hidden-state Observation for Semantic Truthfulness), an efficient white-box framework for hallucination detection in LLMs. We primarily target confused hallucinations marked by internal reasoning instability, while also capturing stubborn hallucinations characterized by premature layer-wise convergence as a complementary signal. By integrating internal geometric dynamics with output probability distributions, GHOST constructs a high-dimensional feature space for non-linear truthfulness classification. Extensive evaluations on FinanceBench, RAGTruth, HaluEval, and PopQA show that GHOST outperforms white-box baselines and achieves competitive black-box performance while reducing computational overhead by over 90%, offering a robust solution for real-time detection.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表