SAC$^3$: Reliable Hallucination Detection in Black-Box Language Models via Semantic-aware Cross-check Consistency
Submission Type: Regular Long Paper
Submission Track: Theme Track: Large Language Models and the Future of NLP
Submission Track 2: Interpretability, Interactivity, and Analysis of Models for NLP
Keywords: Hallucination, semantic consistency, blackbox, large language models, confidence
Abstract: Hallucination detection is a critical step toward understanding the trustworthiness of modern language models (LMs). To achieve this goal, we re-examine existing detection approaches based on the self-consistency of LMs and uncover two types of hallucinations resulting from 1) question-level and 2) model-level, which cannot be effectively identified through self-consistency check alone. Building upon this discovery, we propose a novel sampling-based method, i.e., semantic-aware cross-check consistency (SAC$^3$) that expands on the principle of self-consistency checking. Our SAC$^3$ approach incorporates additional mechanisms to detect both question-level and model-level hallucinations by leveraging advances including semantically equivalent question perturbation and cross-model response consistency checking. Through extensive and systematic empirical analysis, we demonstrate that SAC$^3$ outperforms the state of the art in detecting both non-factual and factual statements across multiple question-answering and open-domain generation benchmarks.
Submission Number: 2508
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