Small Agent Can Also Rock! Empowering Small Language Models as Hallucination Detector

Xiaoxue Cheng, Junyi Li, Xin Zhao, Hongzhi Zhang, Fuzheng Zhang, Di Zhang, Kun Gai, Ji-Rong Wen


Abstract
Hallucination detection is a challenging task for large language models (LLMs), and existing studies heavily rely on powerful closed-source LLMs such as GPT-4. In this paper, we propose an autonomous LLM-based agent framework, called HaluAgent, which enables relatively smaller LLMs (e.g. Baichuan2-Chat 7B) to actively select suitable tools for detecting multiple hallucination types such as text, code, and mathematical expression. In HaluAgent, we integrate the LLM, multi-functional toolbox, and design a fine-grained three-stage detection framework along with memory mechanism. To facilitate the effectiveness of HaluAgent, we leverage existing Chinese and English datasets to synthesize detection trajectories for fine-tuning, which endows HaluAgent with the capability for bilingual hallucination detection. Extensive experiments demonstrate that only using 2K samples for tuning LLMs, HaluAgent can perform hallucination detection on various types of tasks and datasets, achieving performance comparable to or even higher than GPT-4 without tool enhancements on both in-domain and out-of-domain datasets.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.809
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
14600–14615
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.809/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.809
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xiaoxue Cheng, Junyi Li, Xin Zhao, Hongzhi Zhang, Fuzheng Zhang, Di Zhang, Kun Gai, and Ji-Rong Wen. 2024. Small Agent Can Also Rock! Empowering Small Language Models as Hallucination Detector. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 14600–14615, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Small Agent Can Also Rock! Empowering Small Language Models as Hallucination Detector (Cheng et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.809.pdf