Discussion
Loading...

#Tag

Log in
  • About
  • Code of conduct
  • Privacy
  • Users
  • Instances
  • About Bonfire
Hacker News
Hacker News
@h4ckernews@mastodon.social  ·  activity timestamp 6 days ago

Origin of Hallucination in LLMs, The physical source of hallucinations has found

https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.01797

#HackerNews #OriginOfHallucination #LLMs #AIResearch #MachineLearning #NeuralNetworks #arxiv

arXiv.org

H-Neurons: On the Existence, Impact, and Origin of Hallucination-Associated Neurons in LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) frequently generate hallucinations -- plausible but factually incorrect outputs -- undermining their reliability. While prior work has examined hallucinations from macroscopic perspectives such as training data and objectives, the underlying neuron-level mechanisms remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we conduct a systematic investigation into hallucination-associated neurons (H-Neurons) in LLMs from three perspectives: identification, behavioral impact, and origins. Regarding their identification, we demonstrate that a remarkably sparse subset of neurons (less than $0.1\%$ of total neurons) can reliably predict hallucination occurrences, with strong generalization across diverse scenarios. In terms of behavioral impact, controlled interventions reveal that these neurons are causally linked to over-compliance behaviors. Concerning their origins, we trace these neurons back to the pre-trained base models and find that these neurons remain predictive for hallucination detection, indicating they emerge during pre-training. Our findings bridge macroscopic behavioral patterns with microscopic neural mechanisms, offering insights for developing more reliable LLMs.
  • Copy link
  • Flag this post
  • Block

bonfire.cafe

A space for Bonfire maintainers and contributors to communicate

bonfire.cafe: About · Code of conduct · Privacy · Users · Instances
Bonfire social · 1.0.1-alpha.40 no JS en
Automatic federation enabled
Log in
  • Explore
  • About
  • Members
  • Code of Conduct