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Home/Research Paper Library/Why Language Models Hallucinate

Why Language Models Hallucinate

OpenAI's statistical account of hallucination as an incentive problem created by evaluation, proposing scoring changes.

hallucinationtheoryopenai

Research question

Why do models produce confident falsehoods, and why does it persist after post-training?

Key findings

Hallucination arises as classification error in pretraining and is rewarded by evaluations that penalise abstention - Proposes changing benchmark scoring to reward uncertainty

Sources

arxiv.orghttps://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04664

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