ToolHACE: A Dataset for Detecting Hallucinations in Tool-Based LLM Responses

arXiv:2610.17125v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tool-augmented language models ground their responses in external tool outputs, improving reliability beyond parametric knowledge alone. However, even when the correct tool is called and returns accurate information, models may still contradict such outputs, omit critical details, or generate unsupported claims. Existing hallucination benchmarks for tool-augmented dialogue primarily focus on the tool-calling stage, evaluating whether the correct tool and arguments are selected, while overlooking errors that arise during post-tool response generation. To address this gap, we introduce ToolHACE, a span-level benchmark for hallucination detection in tool-augmented LLM responses, covering five fine-grained hallucination categories. Through extensive experiments with modern hallucination detectors, we show that post-tool-call hallucinations are widespread and remain challenging to detect. Our results further demonstrate that effective detection requires training on specialized tool-augmented corpora, while transfer from tool-agnostic hallucination datasets performs poorly in this setting. These findings highlight the need for dedicated benchmarks and models for reliable hallucination detection in tool-augmented language systems.

Abstract:Tool-augmented language models ground their responses in external tool outputs, improving reliability beyond parametric knowledge alone. However, even when the correct tool is called and returns accurate information, models may still contradict such outputs, omit critical details, or generate unsupported claims. Existing hallucination benchmarks for tool-augmented dialogue primarily focus on the tool-calling stage, evaluating whether the correct tool and arguments are selected, while overlooking errors that arise during post-tool response generation. To address this gap, we introduce ToolHACE, a span-level benchmark for hallucination detection in tool-augmented LLM responses, covering five fine-grained hallucination categories. Through extensive experiments with modern hallucination detectors, we show that post-tool-call hallucinations are widespread and remain challenging to detect. Our results further demonstrate that effective detection requires training on specialized tool-augmented corpora, while transfer from tool-agnostic hallucination datasets performs poorly in this setting. These findings highlight the need for dedicated benchmarks and models for reliable hallucination detection in tool-augmented language systems.

Accepted to Findings of EMNLP 2026. 21 pages, 7 tables

Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2610.17125 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2610.17125v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.17125 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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ToolHACE: A Dataset for Detecting Hallucinations in Tool-Based LLM Responses

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