# Fine-Grained Self-Endorsement Improves Factuality and Reasoning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.15631 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15631/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Hallucination detection and mitigation, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 25 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Feb 2024.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Hallucination detection and mitigation](https://mlsanity.com/lr/hallucination-detection-and-mitigation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [Let's Verify Step by Step](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.20050/) (2023)
- [Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17651/) (2023)
- [Mistral 7B](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06825/) (2023)
- [TriviaQA: A Large Scale Distantly Supervised Challenge Dataset for Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03551/) (2017)
- [Inference-Time Intervention: Eliciting Truthful Answers from a Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03341/) (2023)
- [FActScore: Fine-grained Atomic Evaluation of Factual Precision in Long Form Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14251/) (2023)
- [Can LLMs Express Their Uncertainty? An Empirical Evaluation of Confidence Elicitation in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13063/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models as Optimizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03409/) (2023)
- [SelfCheckGPT: Zero-Resource Black-Box Hallucination Detection for Generative Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08896/) (2023)
- [Siren's Song in the AI Ocean: A Survey on Hallucination in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01219/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models Can Self-Improve](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11610/) (2022)
- [DoLa: Decoding by Contrasting Layers Improves Factuality in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03883/) (2023)
- [Check Your Facts and Try Again: Improving Large Language Models with External Knowledge and Automated Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12813/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Verification Reduces Hallucination in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11495/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Verifiability in Generative Search Engines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09848/) (2023)
- [RARR: Researching and Revising What Language Models Say, Using Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08726/) (2022)
- [Universal Self-Consistency for Large Language Model Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17311/) (2023)
- [Self-contradictory Hallucinations of Large Language Models: Evaluation, Detection and Mitigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15852/) (2023)
- [DocTER: Evaluating Document-based Knowledge Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09954/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Multi-group Uncertainty Quantification for Long-form Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21057/) (2024)
- [Graph-based Uncertainty Metrics for Long-form Language Model Outputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20783/) (2024)
- [Atomic Self-Consistency for Better Long Form Generations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13131/) (2024)
- [Synchronous Faithfulness Monitoring for Trustworthy Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13692/) (2024)
- [RAC: Efficient LLM Factuality Correction with Retrieval Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15667/) (2024)
- [Place Matters: Comparing LLM Hallucination Rates for Place-Based Legal Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.06700/) (2025)
- [The Illusionist's Prompt: Exposing the Factual Vulnerabilities of Large Language Models with Linguistic Nuances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02865/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This work studies improving large language model (LLM) generations at inference time by mitigating fact-conflicting hallucinations. Particularly, we propose a self-endorsement framework that leverages the fine-grained fact-level comparisons across multiple sampled responses. Compared with prior ensemble methods (Wang et al., 2022;Chen et al., 2023)) that perform response-level selection, our approach can better alleviate hallucinations, especially for longform generation tasks. Our approach can broadly benefit smaller and open-source LLMs as it mainly conducts simple content-based comparisons. Experiments on Biographies show that our method can effectively improve the factuality of generations with simple and intuitive prompts across different scales of LLMs. Besides, comprehensive analyses on TriviaQA and GSM8K demonstrate the potential of self-endorsement for broader application.