Beyond Document Grounding: Span-Level Hallucination Detection over Code, Tool Output, and Documents

Ádám Kovács, Bowei He, Xue Liu, István Boros, Szilveszter Tóth, Gabor Recski


Abstract
Hallucination detection for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is usually evaluated on natural-language document evidence. However, grounded generation systems increasingly rely on structured inputs: source code, developer-tool output, markdown documents, tables, and repository metadata. We introduce a unified benchmark for span-level hallucination detection over code, tool output, structured documents, and existing natural-language RAG datasets. The benchmark is built by starting from grounded correct answers, injecting localized hallucinations with exact character labels, and validating the code test split with evidence-based review. Our fine-tuned Qwen3.5-2B detector reaches 0.689 span-F1 on the unified test set and 0.60 on the code-agent source, where it substantially outperforms LettuceDetect-large (0.17) and the strongest zero-shot LLM judges we evaluated (at most 0.22). The same model remains competitive on established natural-language benchmarks, with 81.8 RAGTruth example-F1 and 0.724 English PsiloQA IoU.
Anthology ID:
2026.groundlm-1.44
Volume:
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Grounding Language Models: Learning Faithfully and Efficiently (GroundLM 2026)
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Yimu Wang, Yee Man Choi, Di Wu, Siqi Ouyang, Mozhgan Nasr Azadani, Yi R. (May) Fung
Venues:
GroundLM | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
566–577
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.groundlm-1.44/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ádám Kovács, Bowei He, Xue Liu, István Boros, Szilveszter Tóth, and Gabor Recski. 2026. Beyond Document Grounding: Span-Level Hallucination Detection over Code, Tool Output, and Documents. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Grounding Language Models: Learning Faithfully and Efficiently (GroundLM 2026), pages 566–577, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Beyond Document Grounding: Span-Level Hallucination Detection over Code, Tool Output, and Documents (Kovács et al., GroundLM 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.groundlm-1.44.pdf