Large language models (LLMs) often require task-relevant knowledge to augment their internal knowledge through prompts. However, simply injecting external knowledge into prompts does not guarantee that LLMs can identify and use relevant information in the prompts to conduct chain-of-thought reasoning, especially when the LLM’s internal knowledge is derived from biased information on the pretraining data. In this paper, we propose a novel causal view to formally explain the internal knowledge bias of LLMs via a Structural Causal Model (SCM). We review the chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting from a causal perspective and discover that the biased information from pretrained models can impair LLMs’ reasoning abilities. When the CoT reasoning paths are misled by irrelevant information from prompts and are logically incorrect, simply editing factual information is insufficient to reach the correct answer. To estimate the confounding effect on CoT reasoning in LLMs, we use external knowledge as an instrumental variable. We further introduce CoT as a mediator to conduct front-door adjustment and generate logically correct CoTs where the spurious correlation between LLMs’ pretrained knowledge and task queries is reduced. With extensive experiments, we validate that our approach enables more accurate CoT reasoning and enhances LLM generation on knowledge-intensive tasks.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown propensity to generate hallucinated outputs, i.e., texts that are factually incorrect or unsupported. Existing methods for alleviating hallucinations typically require costly human annotations to identify and correct hallucinations in LLM outputs. Moreover, most of these methods focus on a specific type of hallucination, e.g., entity or token errors, which limits their effectiveness in addressing various types of hallucinations exhibited in LLM outputs. To our best knowledge, in this paper we propose the first active learning framework to alleviate LLM hallucinations, reducing costly human annotations of hallucination needed. By measuring fine-grained hallucinations from errors in semantic frame, discourse and content verifiability in text summarization, we propose HAllucination Diversity-Aware Sampling (HADAS) to select diverse hallucinations for annotations in active learning for LLM finetuning. Extensive experiments on three datasets and different backbone models demonstrate advantages of our method in effectively and efficiently mitigating LLM hallucinations.