Bolster Hallucination Detection via Prompt-Guided Data Augmentation

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) have garnered significant interest in AI community. Despite their impressive generation capabilities, they have been found to produce misleading or fabricated information, a phenomenon known as hallucinations. Consequently, hallucination detection has become critical to ensure the reliability of LLM-generated content. One primary challenge in hallucination detection is the scarcity of well-labeled datasets containing both truthful and hallucinated outputs. To address this issue, we introduce Prompt-guided data Augmented haLlucination dEtection (PALE), a novel framework that leverages prompt-guided responses from LLMs as data augmentation for hallucination detection. This strategy can generate both truthful and hallucinated data under prompt guidance at a relatively low cost. To more effectively evaluate the truthfulness of the sparse intermediate embeddings produced by LLMs, we introduce an estimation metric called the Contrastive Mahalanobis Score (CM Score). This score is based on modeling the distributions of truthful and hallucinated data in the activation space. CM Score employs a matrix decomposition approach to more accurately capture the underlying structure of these distributions. Importantly, our framework does not require additional human annotations, offering strong generalizability and practicality for real-world applications. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PALE achieves superior hallucination detection performance, outperforming the competitive baseline by a significant margin of 6.55%.