mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Siren's Song in the AI Ocean: A Survey on Hallucination in Large Language Models

arXiv 2309.01219 ↗First posted 3 Sep 2023cs.CL cs.AI cs.CYcited by 695

Not on the map. Why?

Cited by 99 in LLM reasoning, but placed by its own abstract, which didn’t fit.

Abstract (arXiv)

While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a range of downstream tasks, a significant concern revolves around their propensity to exhibit hallucinations: LLMs occasionally generate content that diverges from the user input, contradicts previously generated context, or misaligns with established world knowledge. This phenomenon poses a substantial challenge to the reliability of LLMs in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we survey recent efforts on the detection, explanation, and mitigation of hallucination, with an emphasis on the unique challenges posed by LLMs. We present taxonomies of the LLM hallucination phenomena and evaluation benchmarks, analyze existing approaches aiming at mitigating LLM hallucination, and discuss potential directions for future research.

Key facts. Cited by 695 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 159 of its 245 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 3 Sep 2023.

Builds on

159 of 245 references.

References · 159

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38 more
  1. 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,355
  2. 2023Visual Instruction Tuningcited by 7,792
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  14. 2021TruthfulQA: Measuring How Models Mimic Human Falsehoodscited by 2,919
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  19. 2022Locating and Editing Factual Associations in GPTcited by 2,609
  20. 2023Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Modelscited by 2,081
  21. 2022Survey of Hallucination in Natural Language Generationcited by 2,056
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  24. 2023Improving Factuality and Reasoning in Language Models through Multiagent Debatecited by 1,739
  25. 2021WebGPT: Browser-assisted question-answering with human feedbackcited by 1,722
  26. 2023Evaluating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Modelscited by 1,696
  27. 2023Jailbroken: How Does LLM Safety Training Fail?cited by 1,565
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Citing papers per year: 2023: 81; 2024: 267; 2025: 214; 2026: 133.

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  1. 2023GPQA: A Graduate-Level Google-Proof Q&A Benchmarkcited by 2,748
  2. 2023Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Large Language Models: A Surveycited by 2,185
  3. 2023The Rise and Potential of Large Language Model Based Agents: A Surveycited by 1,422
  4. 2025Search-R1: Training LLMs to Reason and Leverage Search Engines with Reinforcement Learningcited by 1,371
  5. 2023Aligning Large Multimodal Models with Factually Augmented RLHFcited by 703
  6. 2023Mitigating Object Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models through Visual Contrastive Decodingcited by 671
  7. 2024A Survey on the Memory Mechanism of Large Language Model based Agentscited by 622
  8. 2023HallusionBench: An Advanced Diagnostic Suite for Entangled Language Hallucination and Visual Illusion in Large Vision-Language Modelscited by 572
  9. 2024The WMDP Benchmark: Measuring and Reducing Malicious Use With Unlearningcited by 488
  10. 2024Generative Verifiers: Reward Modeling as Next-Token Predictioncited by 465
  11. 2024Understanding the planning of LLM agents: A surveycited by 414
  12. 2024Agentless: Demystifying LLM-based Software Engineering Agentscited by 400
38 more
  1. 2023A Survey of Hallucination in Large Foundation Modelscited by 365
  2. 2024A Survey on Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Modelscited by 352
  3. 2024Hallucination is Inevitable: An Innate Limitation of Large Language Modelscited by 329
  4. 2024INSIDE: LLMs' Internal States Retain the Power of Hallucination Detectioncited by 317
  5. 2023A Survey of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedbackcited by 259
  6. 2024Semantic Entropy Probes: Robust and Cheap Hallucination Detection in LLMscited by 246
  7. 2023Beyond Hallucinations: Enhancing LVLMs through Hallucination-Aware Direct Preference Optimizationcited by 223
  8. 2024Tool Learning with Large Language Models: A Surveycited by 221
  9. 2023Survey on Factuality in Large Language Models: Knowledge, Retrieval and Domain-Specificitycited by 204
  10. 2023Chain-of-Note: Enhancing Robustness in Retrieval-Augmented Language Modelscited by 180
  11. 2023Talk like a Graph: Encoding Graphs for Large Language Modelscited by 175
  12. 2023Can LLM-Generated Misinformation Be Detected?cited by 173
  13. 2024Large Language Model-Based Agents for Software Engineering: A Surveycited by 173
  14. 2024Large Language Model-Brained GUI Agents: A Surveycited by 160
  15. 2024Video-of-Thought: Step-by-Step Video Reasoning from Perception to Cognitioncited by 151
  16. 2024Fine-grained Hallucination Detection and Editing for Language Modelscited by 146
  17. 2024Large Legal Fictions: Profiling Legal Hallucinations in Large Language Modelscited by 144
  18. 2024ShapeLLM: Universal 3D Object Understanding for Embodied Interactioncited by 133
  19. 2024GNN-RAG: Graph Neural Retrieval for Large Language Model Reasoningcited by 128
  20. 2023Factuality Challenges in the Era of Large Language Modelscited by 125
  21. 2024LITA: Language Instructed Temporal-Localization Assistantcited by 124
  22. 2024AgentScope: A Flexible yet Robust Multi-Agent Platformcited by 120
  23. 2024Next-Generation Database Interfaces: A Survey of LLM-based Text-to-SQLcited by 118
  24. 2024Empowering Biomedical Discovery with AI Agentscited by 117
  25. 2024Beyond Functional Correctness: Exploring Hallucinations in LLM-Generated Codecited by 106
  26. 2024Best Practices and Lessons Learned on Synthetic Datacited by 104
  27. 2024SaySelf: Teaching LLMs to Express Confidence with Self-Reflective Rationalescited by 102
  28. 2023Graph Foundation Models: Concepts, Opportunities and Challengescited by 101
  29. 2023A Survey on LLM-Generated Text Detection: Necessity, Methods, and Future Directionscited by 101
  30. 2024Model Editing Harms General Abilities of Large Language Models: Regularization to the Rescuecited by 101
  31. 2023Towards LLM-based Fact Verification on News Claims with a Hierarchical Step-by-Step Prompting Methodcited by 97
  32. 2024HaloScope: Harnessing Unlabeled LLM Generations for Hallucination Detectioncited by 96
  33. 2024Making Them Ask and Answer: Jailbreaking Large Language Models in Few Queries via Disguise and Reconstructioncited by 95
  34. 2024AutoAttacker: A Large Language Model Guided System to Implement Automatic Cyber-attackscited by 94
  35. 2024Learning Dynamics of LLM Finetuningcited by 93
  36. 2024LLM Hallucinations in Practical Code Generation: Phenomena, Mechanism, and Mitigationcited by 92
  37. 2025VerlTool: Towards Holistic Agentic Reinforcement Learning with Tool Usecited by 92
  38. 2025DeepSeek-R1 Thoughtology: Let's think about LLM Reasoningcited by 91

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