← Back to papers

Unfamiliar Finetuning Examples Control How Language Models Hallucinate

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

Paper Summary

Paperzilla title
LLM Hallucinations Mimic Unfamiliar Training Data

This paper finds that unfamiliar examples in an LLM's finetuning data significantly influence its hallucinations, with the model's predictions mirroring responses associated with these examples. This suggests that manipulating the finetuning data could steer the model towards more desirable responses, like expressing uncertainty when it doesn't know.

Explain Like I'm Five

When large language models (LLMs) make things up, they often repeat stuff they learned during training, even if it's wrong. By changing their training, we can make them better at admitting when they don't know something.

Possible Conflicts of Interest

None identified

Identified Limitations

Focus on Question Answering Tasks
The study primarily uses question-answering tasks as testbeds, which may not fully represent the complexity of long-form generation where hallucinations are more prevalent.
Limited Scope of Unfamiliarity
The paper defines unfamiliar inputs as those outside the pretrained model's knowledge but within the finetuning data distribution. Real-world queries often fall into a spectrum of partial familiarity, which isn't fully addressed.
Scalability of Conservative Reward Models
While conservative reward models show promise, their reliance on ground-truth rewards for labeling during training poses scalability challenges, especially for large datasets.

Rating Explanation

This paper presents a novel perspective on how LLMs hallucinate and offers a potential solution through conservative reward models. While the focus on QA tasks and the limited scope of unfamiliarity are limitations, the core findings and the proposed approach are valuable contributions to the field.

Good to know

This is the Starter analysis. Paperzilla Pro fact-checks every citation, researches author backgrounds and funding sources, and uses advanced AI reasoning for more thorough insights.

Explore Pro →

Topic Hierarchy

File Information

Original Title: Unfamiliar Finetuning Examples Control How Language Models Hallucinate
Uploaded: September 06, 2025 at 03:26 AM
Privacy: Public