Lookback Lens: Detecting and Mitigating Contextual Hallucinations in Large Language Models Using Only Attention Maps

Yung-Sung Chuang, Linlu Qiu, Cheng-Yu Hsieh, Ranjay Krishna, Yoon Kim, James Glass


Abstract
When asked to summarize articles or answer questions given a passage, large language models (LLMs) can hallucinate details and respond with unsubstantiated answers that are inaccurate with respect to the input context. This paper describes a simple approach for detecting such **contextual hallucinations**. We hypothesize that contextual hallucinations are related to the extent to which an LLM attends to information in the provided context versus its own generations. Based on this intuition, we propose a simple hallucination detection model whose input features are given by the ratio of attention weights on the context versus newly generated tokens (for each attention head). We find that a linear classifier based on these _lookback ratio_ features is as effective as a richer detector that utilizes the entire hidden states of an LLM or a text-based entailment model. The lookback ratio-based detector—**Lookback Lens**—is found to transfer across tasks and even models, allowing a detector that is trained on a 7B model to be applied (without retraining) to a larger 13B model. We further apply this detector to mitigate contextual hallucinations, and find that a simple classifier-guided decoding approach is able to reduce the amount of hallucination, for example by 9.6% in the XSum summarization task.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.84
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:
1419–1436
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.84
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yung-Sung Chuang, Linlu Qiu, Cheng-Yu Hsieh, Ranjay Krishna, Yoon Kim, and James Glass. 2024. Lookback Lens: Detecting and Mitigating Contextual Hallucinations in Large Language Models Using Only Attention Maps. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 1419–1436, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Lookback Lens: Detecting and Mitigating Contextual Hallucinations in Large Language Models Using Only Attention Maps (Chuang et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.84.pdf
Software:
 2024.emnlp-main.84.software.zip