In-Context Sharpness as Alerts: An Inner Representation Perspective for Hallucination Mitigation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2403.01548v3
• Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2024 09:49:28 GMT
• Title: In-Context Sharpness as Alerts: An Inner Representation Perspective for Hallucination Mitigation
• Authors: Shiqi Chen, Miao Xiong, Junteng Liu, Zhengxuan Wu, Teng Xiao, Siyang Gao, Junxian He
• Abstract summary: Large language models (LLMs) frequently hallucinate and produce factual errors. correct generations tend to have sharper context activations in the hidden states of the in-context tokens, compared to the incorrect ones. We propose an entropy-based metric to quantify the sharpness'' among the in-context hidden states and incorporate it into the decoding process.
• Score: 36.31646727970656
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) frequently hallucinate and produce factual errors, yet our understanding of why they make these errors remains limited. In this study, we delve into the underlying mechanisms of LLM hallucinations from the perspective of inner representations, and discover a salient pattern associated with hallucinations: correct generations tend to have sharper context activations in the hidden states of the in-context tokens, compared to the incorrect ones. Leveraging this insight, we propose an entropy-based metric to quantify the ``sharpness'' among the in-context hidden states and incorporate it into the decoding process to formulate a constrained decoding approach. Experiments on various knowledge-seeking and hallucination benchmarks demonstrate our approach's consistent effectiveness, for example, achieving up to an 8.6 point improvement on TruthfulQA. We believe this study can improve our understanding of hallucinations and serve as a practical solution for hallucination mitigation.

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