Analyzing the Correlation Between Hallucinations and Knowledge Conflicts in Large Language Models

Abstract:Hallucinations -- factually incorrect or unverifiable outputs -- remain one of the most challenging limitations of Large Language Models (LLMs), especially in knowledge-intensive tasks. One proposed explanation is internal knowledge conflicts arising from fixed, outdated training data. This paper investigates whether internal representations linked to knowledge conflicts correlate with hallucination behaviors in LLMs. Using probing techniques inspired by two prior works, we analyzed activations from hidden, attention, and MLP layers, as well as output logits, across predefined tasks. We probed LLaMA-3-8B on hallucination detection benchmarks and Falcon-7B on a knowledge conflict dataset. Our findings show that, although conceptually related, hallucination activation patterns cannot be fully reduced to or explained by knowledge conflict representations. Nonetheless, probing proves a robust tool across multiple languages and activation types, supporting its role in improving LLM interpretability. This work advances the broader understanding of hallucinations in LLMs and underscores the value of fine-grained analysis of their internal behavior.

Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2606.08705 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2606.08705v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.08705 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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