Factuality of Large Language Models: A Survey
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Abstract (arXiv)
Large language models (LLMs), especially when instruction-tuned for chat, have become part of our daily lives, freeing people from the process of searching, extracting, and integrating information from multiple sources by offering a straightforward answer to a variety of questions in a single place. Unfortunately, in many cases, LLM responses are factually incorrect, which limits their applicability in real-world scenarios. As a result, research on evaluating and improving the factuality of LLMs has attracted a lot of attention recently. In this survey, we critically analyze existing work with the aim to identify the major challenges and their associated causes, pointing out to potential solutions for improving the factuality of LLMs, and analyzing the obstacles to automated factuality evaluation for open-ended text generation. We further offer an outlook on where future research should go.
Key facts. Cited by 64 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 46 of its 56 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 4 Feb 2024.
Builds on
46 of 56 references.
References · 46
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- 2019The Curious Case of Neural Text Degenerationcited by 2,881
- 2022Locating and Editing Factual Associations in GPTcited by 2,609
- 2023Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Large Language Models: A Surveycited by 2,185
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- 2020Leveraging Passage Retrieval with Generative Models for Open Domain Question Answeringcited by 1,203
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- 2021Did Aristotle Use a Laptop? A Question Answering Benchmark with Implicit Reasoning Strategiescited by 736
- 2023Mitigating Object Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models through Visual Contrastive Decodingcited by 671
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- 2018Behavioral Cloning from Observationcited by 482
- 2023Mitigating Hallucination in Large Multi-Modal Models via Robust Instruction Tuningcited by 439
- 2021A Survey on Automated Fact-Checkingcited by 376
- 2023A Survey of Hallucination in Large Foundation Modelscited by 365
- 2023Trusting Your Evidence: Hallucinate Less with Context-aware Decodingcited by 319
- 2023How Language Model Hallucinations Can Snowballcited by 310
- 2023FreshLLMs: Refreshing Large Language Models with Search Engine Augmentationcited by 308
- 2023Can We Edit Factual Knowledge by In-Context Learning?cited by 284
- 2024A Comprehensive Survey of Hallucination Mitigation Techniques in Large Language Modelscited by 266
- 2023FacTool: Factuality Detection in Generative AI -- A Tool Augmented Framework for Multi-Task and Multi-Domain Scenarioscited by 247
- 2023Fine-tuning Language Models for Factualitycited by 219
- 2023Survey on Factuality in Large Language Models: Knowledge, Retrieval and Domain-Specificitycited by 204
- 2023A Stitch in Time Saves Nine: Detecting and Mitigating Hallucinations of LLMs by Validating Low-Confidence Generationcited by 202
- 2023The Troubling Emergence of Hallucination in Large Language Models -- An Extensive Definition, Quantification, and Prescriptive Remediationscited by 130
- 2023Generating Benchmarks for Factuality Evaluation of Language Modelscited by 103
- 2023FELM: Benchmarking Factuality Evaluation of Large Language Modelscited by 66
- 2023Shall We Pretrain Autoregressive Language Models with Retrieval? A Comprehensive Studycited by 63
- 2023Ever: Mitigating Hallucination in Large Language Models through Real-Time Verification and Rectificationcited by 38
- 2023Halo: Estimation and Reduction of Hallucinations in Open-Source Weak Large Language Modelscited by 36
- 2023textitDial BeInfo for Faithfulness: Improving Factuality of Information-Seeking Dialogue via Behavioural Fine-Tuningcited by 9
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Citing papers per year: 2024: 6; 2025: 38; 2026: 20.
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- 2025Robustness in Large Language Models: A Survey of Mitigation Strategies and Evaluation Metricscited by 12
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- 2024How Reliable are LLMs as Knowledge Bases? Re-thinking Facutality and Consistencycited by 10
- 2025Test-Time Scaling in Reasoning Models Is Not Effective for Knowledge-Intensive Tasks Yetcited by 10
- 2025Right Is Not Enough: The Pitfalls of Outcome Supervision in Training LLMs for Math Reasoningcited by 9
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- 2025A Comprehensive Taxonomy of Negation for NLP and Neural Retrieverscited by 4
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- 2026Towards Mitigating Fabricated Consensus: The Active Provenance Gate for Multi-Agent Debate Synthesis25 Sep 2026
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- 2026MedSNIP: Building and Benchmarking Snippet-Level Granularity for Medical Fact Verification11 Sep 2026
- 2026The Privacy-Hallucination Tradeoff in Differentially Private Language Models31 Aug 2026
- 2026Beyond Semantic Equivalence: Logical Graphs for LLM Uncertainty Quantification18 Jul 2026
- 2026Whose Name Comes Up? III: Persona Prompting Effects in LLM-Based Scholar Recommendation27 May 2026
- 2026Fine-Tuning Without Forgetting via Loss-Adaptive Learning Rates19 May 2026
- 2026TRACE: Trajectory Correction from Cross-layer Evidence for Hallucination Reduction18 May 2026
- 2026When Answers Stray from Questions: Hallucination Detection via Question-Answer Orthogonal Decomposition14 May 2026
- 2026STRUCTSURVEY: Structured Agentic Retrieval for Automated Survey Paper Generation12 May 2026
- 2026Don't Click That: Teaching Web Agents to Resist Deceptive Interfaces10 May 2026
- 2026An Information-Geometric Framework for Stability Analysis of Large Language Models under Entropic Stress27 Apr 2026
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- 2026FactNet: A Billion-Scale Knowledge Graph for Multilingual Factual Grounding3 Feb 2026
- 2026Factuality on Demand: Controlling the Factuality-Informativeness Trade-off in Text Generation31 Jan 2026
- 2026Even GPT-5.2 Can't Count to Five: The Case for Zero-Error Horizons in Trustworthy LLMs22 Jan 2026
- 2026Small Updates, Big Doubts: Does Parameter-Efficient Fine-tuning Enhance Hallucination Detection ?17 Jan 2026
- 2026MedRAGChecker: Claim-Level Verification for Biomedical Retrieval-Augmented Generation10 Jan 2026
- 2025Lie to Me: Knowledge Graphs for Robust Hallucination Self-Detection in LLMs29 Dec 2025
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- 2025MR-Align: Meta-Reasoning Informed Factuality Alignment for Large Reasoning Models27 Oct 2025
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- 2025LLM×MapReduce-V3: Enabling Interactive In-Depth Survey Generation through a MCP-Driven Hierarchically Modular Agent System13 Oct 2025
- 2025Comprehensiveness Metrics for Automatic Evaluation of Factual Recall in Text Generation9 Oct 2025
- 2025Generating Findings for Jaw Cysts in Dental Panoramic Radiographs Using a GPT-Based VLM: A Preliminary Study on Building a Two-Stage Self-Correction Loop with Structured Output (SLSO) Framework2 Oct 2025
- 2025An Annotation Scheme for Factuality and its Application to Parliamentary Proceedings30 Sep 2025
- 2025ScenarioBench: Trace-Grounded Compliance Evaluation for Text-to-SQL and RAG29 Sep 2025
- 2025MetaRAG: Metamorphic Testing for Hallucination Detection in RAG Systems11 Sep 2025
- 2025PersonaFuse: A Personality Activation-Driven Framework for Enhancing Human-LLM Interactions9 Sep 2025
- 2025Test-Time Scaling in Reasoning Models Is Not Effective for Knowledge-Intensive Tasks Yet8 Sep 2025
- 2025Exploring NLP Benchmarks in an Extremely Low-Resource Setting4 Sep 2025
- 2025GIER: Gap-Driven Self-Refinement for Large Language Models30 Aug 2025
- 2025KG-CQR: Leveraging Structured Relation Representations in Knowledge Graphs for Contextual Query Retrieval28 Aug 2025
- 2025Challenges for Generative AI in Legal Reasoning26 Aug 2025
- 2025Hallucination to Truth: A Review of Fact-Checking and Factuality Evaluation in Large Language Models5 Aug 2025
- 2025DAMR: Efficient and Adaptive Context-Aware Knowledge Graph Question Answering with LLM-Guided MCTS1 Aug 2025
- 2025A Comprehensive Taxonomy of Negation for NLP and Neural Retrievers30 Jul 2025
- 2025From the Fluency Fallacy to the Micro-to-Macro Validity Gap: Opportunities and Pitfalls of LLMs in Social Simulation25 Jul 2025
- 2025The Curious Case of Factuality Finetuning: Models' Internal Beliefs Can Improve Factuality11 Jul 2025
- 2025Querying Large Automotive Software Models: Agentic vs. Direct LLM Approaches16 Jun 2025
- 2025Probabilistic distances-based hallucination detection in LLMs with RAG11 Jun 2025
- 2025AssertBench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Self-Assertion in Large Language Models8 Jun 2025
- 2025Right Is Not Enough: The Pitfalls of Outcome Supervision in Training LLMs for Math Reasoning7 Jun 2025
- 2025On the Adaptive Psychological Persuasion of Large Language Models7 Jun 2025
- 2025How Does Response Length Affect Long-Form Factuality29 May 2025
- 2025ScEdit: Script-based Assessment of Knowledge Editing29 May 2025
- 2025Robustness in Large Language Models: A Survey of Mitigation Strategies and Evaluation Metrics24 May 2025
- 2025NEXT-EVAL: Next Evaluation of Traditional and LLM Web Data Record Extraction21 May 2025
50 newest of 64 All 64 (JSON)
- 2025Eliciting Language Model Behaviors with Investigator Agentscited by 21
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- 2026STRUCTSURVEY: Structured Agentic Retrieval for Automated Survey Paper Generationcited by 3
- 2025LLM×MapReduce-V3: Enabling Interactive In-Depth Survey Generation through a MCP-Driven Hierarchically Modular Agent Systemcited by 2
- 2026Don't Click That: Teaching Web Agents to Resist Deceptive Interfacescited by 1
- 2026Towards Mitigating Fabricated Consensus: The Active Provenance Gate for Multi-Agent Debate Synthesiscited by 0
- 2026Towards Mitigating Fabricated Consensus: The Active Provenance Gate for Multi-Agent Debate Synthesis25 Sep 2026
- 2026STRUCTSURVEY: Structured Agentic Retrieval for Automated Survey Paper Generation12 May 2026
- 2026Don't Click That: Teaching Web Agents to Resist Deceptive Interfaces10 May 2026
- 2025LLM×MapReduce-V3: Enabling Interactive In-Depth Survey Generation through a MCP-Driven Hierarchically Modular Agent System13 Oct 2025
- 2025Querying Large Automotive Software Models: Agentic vs. Direct LLM Approaches16 Jun 2025
- 2025Simulation Agent: A Framework for Integrating Simulation and Large Language Models for Enhanced Decision-Making19 May 2025
- 2025Eliciting Language Model Behaviors with Investigator Agents3 Feb 2025
- 2025Evaluating Step-by-step Reasoning Traces: A Surveycited by 62
- 2024How Reliable are LLMs as Knowledge Bases? Re-thinking Facutality and Consistencycited by 10
- 2025Test-Time Scaling in Reasoning Models Is Not Effective for Knowledge-Intensive Tasks Yetcited by 10
- 2025Right Is Not Enough: The Pitfalls of Outcome Supervision in Training LLMs for Math Reasoningcited by 9
- 2025Challenges for Generative AI in Legal Reasoningcited by 7
- 2025MR-Align: Meta-Reasoning Informed Factuality Alignment for Large Reasoning Modelscited by 4
- 2025Pitfalls of Scale: Investigating the Inverse Task of Redefinition in Large Language Modelscited by 1
- 2025MR-Align: Meta-Reasoning Informed Factuality Alignment for Large Reasoning Models27 Oct 2025
- 2025Test-Time Scaling in Reasoning Models Is Not Effective for Knowledge-Intensive Tasks Yet8 Sep 2025
- 2025Challenges for Generative AI in Legal Reasoning26 Aug 2025
- 2025Right Is Not Enough: The Pitfalls of Outcome Supervision in Training LLMs for Math Reasoning7 Jun 2025
- 2025Pitfalls of Scale: Investigating the Inverse Task of Redefinition in Large Language Models18 Feb 2025
- 2025Evaluating Step-by-step Reasoning Traces: A Survey17 Feb 2025
- 2024How Reliable are LLMs as Knowledge Bases? Re-thinking Facutality and Consistency18 Jul 2024
- 2025Hallucination to Truth: A Review of Fact-Checking and Factuality Evaluation in Large Language Modelscited by 13
- 2025MetaRAG: Metamorphic Testing for Hallucination Detection in RAG Systemscited by 2
- 2025Probabilistic distances-based hallucination detection in LLMs with RAGcited by 1
- 2025KG-CQR: Leveraging Structured Relation Representations in Knowledge Graphs for Contextual Query Retrievalcited by 1
- 2026MedRAGChecker: Claim-Level Verification for Biomedical Retrieval-Augmented Generationcited by 1
- 2025ScenarioBench: Trace-Grounded Compliance Evaluation for Text-to-SQL and RAGcited by 0
- 2026MedRAGChecker: Claim-Level Verification for Biomedical Retrieval-Augmented Generation10 Jan 2026
- 2025ScenarioBench: Trace-Grounded Compliance Evaluation for Text-to-SQL and RAG29 Sep 2025
- 2025MetaRAG: Metamorphic Testing for Hallucination Detection in RAG Systems11 Sep 2025
- 2025KG-CQR: Leveraging Structured Relation Representations in Knowledge Graphs for Contextual Query Retrieval28 Aug 2025
- 2025Hallucination to Truth: A Review of Fact-Checking and Factuality Evaluation in Large Language Models5 Aug 2025
- 2025Probabilistic distances-based hallucination detection in LLMs with RAG11 Jun 2025
- 2025HalluLens: LLM Hallucination Benchmarkcited by 88
- 2024Generative Large Language Models in Automated Fact-Checking: A Surveycited by 19
- 2024Loki: An Open-Source Tool for Fact Verificationcited by 16
- 2025Robustness in Large Language Models: A Survey of Mitigation Strategies and Evaluation Metricscited by 12
- 2025Video SimpleQA: Towards Factuality Evaluation in Large Video Language Modelscited by 11
- 2025From the Fluency Fallacy to the Micro-to-Macro Validity Gap: Opportunities and Pitfalls of LLMs in Social Simulationcited by 8
- 2024Organizing Unstructured Image Collections using Natural Languagecited by 7
- 2025HICD: Hallucination-Inducing via Attention Dispersion for Contrastive Decoding to Mitigate Hallucinations in Large Language Modelscited by 7
- 2024Chinese SafetyQA: A Safety Short-form Factuality Benchmark for Large Language Modelscited by 6
- 2025How Does Response Length Affect Long-Form Factualitycited by 6
- 2025DAMR: Efficient and Adaptive Context-Aware Knowledge Graph Question Answering with LLM-Guided MCTScited by 6
- 2025PersonaFuse: A Personality Activation-Driven Framework for Enhancing Human-LLM Interactionscited by 5
12 most cited of 42 All 42 (JSON)
- 2026Can We Trust the Judges? Validation of Factuality Evaluation Methods via Answer Perturbation14 Sep 2026
- 2026MedSNIP: Building and Benchmarking Snippet-Level Granularity for Medical Fact Verification11 Sep 2026
- 2026The Privacy-Hallucination Tradeoff in Differentially Private Language Models31 Aug 2026
- 2026Beyond Semantic Equivalence: Logical Graphs for LLM Uncertainty Quantification18 Jul 2026
- 2026Whose Name Comes Up? III: Persona Prompting Effects in LLM-Based Scholar Recommendation27 May 2026
- 2026Fine-Tuning Without Forgetting via Loss-Adaptive Learning Rates19 May 2026
- 2026TRACE: Trajectory Correction from Cross-layer Evidence for Hallucination Reduction18 May 2026
- 2026When Answers Stray from Questions: Hallucination Detection via Question-Answer Orthogonal Decomposition14 May 2026
- 2026An Information-Geometric Framework for Stability Analysis of Large Language Models under Entropic Stress27 Apr 2026
- 2026Overreliance on AI in Information-seeking from Video Content20 Mar 2026
- 2026Do Large Language Models Adapt to Language Variation across Socioeconomic Status?12 Feb 2026
- 2026FactNet: A Billion-Scale Knowledge Graph for Multilingual Factual Grounding3 Feb 2026
12 newest of 42 All 42 (JSON)