A comprehensive taxonomy of hallucinations in Large Language Models · HackerPapers discussions

A comprehensive taxonomy of hallucinations in Large Language Models — mentioned by godelski

Fri, 08 Aug 2025 20:16:33 GMT

I'm actually curious about how you both come to those definitions of hallucinations. It gets very difficult to distinguish these things when you dig into them. Simon dropped this paper[0] in another thread[1] and while they provide a formal mathematical definition I don't think this makes it clear (I mean it is one person (who doesn't have a long publication record, PhD, or work at a university), but following their definition is still a bit muddy. They say the truth has to be in the training but don't clarify if they mean in training distribution or literal training example. To make a clear…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

A comprehensive taxonomy of hallucinations in Large Language Models — mentioned by simonw

Thu, 07 Aug 2025 23:22:32 GMT

My personal definition of hallucination (which I thought was widespread) is when a model states a fact about the world that is entirely made up - "the James Webb telescope took the first photograph of an exoplanet" for example. I just got pointed to this new paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01781 - "A comprehensive taxonomy of hallucinations in Large Language Models" - which has a definition in the introduction which matches my mental model: "This phenomenon describes the generation of content that, while often plausible and coherent, is factually incorrect, inconsistent, or entirely…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.