TRE: Training-Free Hallucination Detection for Diffusion Language Models

arXiv:2607.22661v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion large language models (D-LLMs) have recently gained increasing attention, yet their reliability is significantly hindered by the hallucination problem. Existing hallucination detection approaches for D-LLMs mainly follow a training-based paradigm, relying on data-driven training to optimize the detector. Such reliance not only limits their generalizability across domains models but also incurs additional training cost and deployment overhead. To address these limitations, we propose TRE, a training-free hallucination detection metric for D-LLMs. TRE is a parameter-free and single-run metric that estimates hallucination risk directly from the entropy signals of a single generation, without requiring any detector training or repeated sampling. TRE extracts entropy signals within the D-LLM decoding process along both the spatial and temporal dimensions. From a token-level spatial perspective, we focus on revealing tokens as the most informative carriers of uncertainty, capturing where uncertainty is actively committed. From a diffusion step-level temporal perspective, we empirically identify the dominance of late-step entropy and hence aggregate these signals with a simple linear weighting scheme to obtain TRE. Extensive experiments on multiple D-LLMs and QA datasets demonstrate that TRE achieves competitive performance, while enjoying strong generalizability, efficiency, and robustness.

Abstract:Diffusion large language models (D-LLMs) have recently gained increasing attention, yet their reliability is significantly hindered by the hallucination problem. Existing hallucination detection approaches for D-LLMs mainly follow a training-based paradigm, relying on data-driven training to optimize the detector. Such reliance not only limits their generalizability across domains models but also incurs additional training cost and deployment overhead. To address these limitations, we propose TRE, a training-free hallucination detection metric for D-LLMs. TRE is a parameter-free and single-run metric that estimates hallucination risk directly from the entropy signals of a single generation, without requiring any detector training or repeated sampling. TRE extracts entropy signals within the D-LLM decoding process along both the spatial and temporal dimensions. From a token-level spatial perspective, we focus on revealing tokens as the most informative carriers of uncertainty, capturing where uncertainty is actively committed. From a diffusion step-level temporal perspective, we empirically identify the dominance of late-step entropy and hence aggregate these signals with a simple linear weighting scheme to obtain TRE. Extensive experiments on multiple D-LLMs and QA datasets demonstrate that TRE achieves competitive performance, while enjoying strong generalizability, efficiency, and robustness.

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2607.22661 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2607.22661v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.22661 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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TRE: Training-Free Hallucination Detection for Diffusion Language Models

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