Seongmin Lee CV

Probing LLM Hallucination from Within: Perturbation-Driven Method via Internal Knowledge

IEEE International Conference on Big Data (BigData), 2025
Student Travel Award

Abstract

LLM hallucination, where unfaithful text is generated, presents a critical challenge for LLMs’ practical applications. Current detection methods often resort to external knowledge, LLM fine-tuning, or supervised training with large hallucination-labeled datasets. Moreover, these approaches do not distinguish between different types of hallucinations, which is crucial for enhancing detection performance. To address such limitations, we introduce hallucination probing, a new task that classifies LLM-generated text into three categories: aligned, misaligned, and fabricated. Driven by our novel discovery that perturbing key entities in prompts affects LLM’s generation of these three types of text differently, we propose SHINE, a novel hallucination probing method that does not require external knowledge, supervised training, or LLM fine-tuning. SHINE is effective in hallucination probing across three modern LLMs, and achieves state-of-the-art performance in hallucination detection, outperforming seven competing methods across four datasets and four LLMs, underscoring the importance of probing for accurate detection.

BibTeX

			
@inproceedings{lee2025probing,
  title={Probing LLM Hallucination from Within: Perturbation-Driven Method via Internal Knowledge},
  author={Lee, Seongmin and Hsu, Hsiang and Chen, Chun-Fu and Chau, Duen Horng (Polo)},
  booktitle={IEEE International Conference on Big Data (BigData)},
  year={2025},
}