Strong hallucinations from negation and how to fix them
On the map: LLM reasoning → Hallucination detection and mitigation
Abstract (arXiv)
Despite great performance on many tasks, language models (LMs) still struggle with reasoning, sometimes providing responses that cannot possibly be true because they stem from logical incoherence. We call such responses textitstrong hallucinations and prove that they follow from an LM's computation of its internal representations for logical operators and outputs from those representations. Focusing on negation, we provide a novel solution in which negation is treated not as another element of a latent representation, but as textitan operation over an LM's latent representations that constrains how they may evolve. We show that our approach improves model performance in cloze prompting and natural language inference tasks with negation without requiring training on sparse negative data.
Key facts. Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Hallucination detection and mitigation, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 39 of its 92 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 16 Feb 2024.
Builds on
39 of 92 references.
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2025: 4; 2026: 2.
6 papers.
- 2025Hallucination Detection in Large Language Models with Metamorphic Relationscited by 24
- 2025Investigating Symbolic Triggers of Hallucination in Gemma Models Across HaluEval and TruthfulQAcited by 3
- 2025On the Thinking-Language Modeling Gap in Large Language Modelscited by 0
- 2025The Impact of Negated Text on Hallucination with Large Language Modelscited by 0
- 2026Walking on the DARKSIDEcited by 0
- 2026Understanding as No-Arbitrage: Bounded Dutch Books as a Definition and Training Objective for Language Modelscited by 0
- 2026Understanding as No-Arbitrage: Bounded Dutch Books as a Definition and Training Objective for Language Models30 Sep 2026
- 2026Walking on the DARKSIDE24 Aug 2026
- 2025The Impact of Negated Text on Hallucination with Large Language Models23 Oct 2025
- 2025Investigating Symbolic Triggers of Hallucination in Gemma Models Across HaluEval and TruthfulQA9 Sep 2025
- 2025On the Thinking-Language Modeling Gap in Large Language Models19 May 2025
- 2025Hallucination Detection in Large Language Models with Metamorphic Relations20 Feb 2025
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- 2026Listen to the Layers: Mitigating Hallucinations with Inter-Layer Disagreement
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- 2026Why LLMs Hallucinate on Structured Knowledge: A Mechanistic Analysis of Reasoning over Linearized Representations
- 2024Benchmarking Hallucination in Large Language Models based on Unanswerable Math Word Problem
- 2022Discovering Latent Knowledge in Language Models Without Supervision
- 2026Score × Decoder: A Unified View of Unsupervised Inference-Time Scaling for Hallucination Mitigation