Are Hallucinations Bad Estimations?
- URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21473v1
- Date: Thu, 25 Sep 2025 19:39:09 GMT
- Title: Are Hallucinations Bad Estimations?
- Authors: Hude Liu, Jerry Yao-Chieh Hu, Jennifer Yuntong Zhang, Zhao Song, Han Liu,
- Abstract summary: We show that even loss-minimizing optimal estimators still hallucinate.<n>This reframes hallucination as structural misalignment between loss minimization and human-acceptable outputs.
- Score: 19.11290014868759
- License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
- Abstract: We formalize hallucinations in generative models as failures to link an estimate to any plausible cause. Under this interpretation, we show that even loss-minimizing optimal estimators still hallucinate. We confirm this with a general high probability lower bound on hallucinate rate for generic data distributions. This reframes hallucination as structural misalignment between loss minimization and human-acceptable outputs, and hence estimation errors induced by miscalibration. Experiments on coin aggregation, open-ended QA, and text-to-image support our theory.
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