# WildHallucinations: Evaluating Long-form Factuality in LLMs with Real-World Entity Queries

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.17468 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.17468/

## Key facts

- Cited by 26 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Mistral 7B](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06825/) (2023)
- [FActScore: Fine-grained Atomic Evaluation of Factual Precision in Long Form Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14251/) (2023)
- [On Faithfulness and Factuality in Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00661/) (2020)
- [WildChat: 1M ChatGPT Interaction Logs in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01470/) (2024)
- [Enabling Large Language Models to Generate Text with Citations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14627/) (2023)
- [SummaC: Re-Visiting NLI-based Models for Inconsistency Detection in Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09525/) (2021)
- [Asking and Answering Questions to Evaluate the Factual Consistency of Summaries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04228/) (2020)
- [HaluEval: A Large-Scale Hallucination Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11747/) (2023)
- [FEQA: A Question Answering Evaluation Framework for Faithfulness Assessment in Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.03754/) (2020)
- [QAFactEval: Improved QA-Based Factual Consistency Evaluation for Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08542/) (2021)
- [Fine-grained Hallucination Detection and Editing for Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06855/) (2024)
- [Evaluating Factuality in Generation with Dependency-level Entailment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05478/) (2020)
- [FELM: Benchmarking Factuality Evaluation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00741/) (2023)
- [Evaluating LLMs at Detecting Errors in LLM Responses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03602/) (2024)
- [The Shifted and The Overlooked: A Task-oriented Investigation of User-GPT Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12418/) (2023)
- [HaluEval-Wild: Evaluating Hallucinations of Language Models in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04307/) (2024)
- [Worse than Random? An Embarrassingly Simple Probing Evaluation of Large Multimodal Models in Medical VQA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20421/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models and User Trust: Consequence of Self-Referential Learning Loop and the Deskilling of Healthcare Professionals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14691/) (2024)
- [Disinformation in the Online Information Ecosystem: Detection, Mitigation and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.09113/) (2020)
- [The Rise and Fall of Fake News sites: A Traffic Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.09258/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [The FACTS Grounding Leaderboard: Benchmarking LLMs' Ability to Ground Responses to Long-Form Input](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03200/) (2025)
- [DeepSearchQA: Bridging the Comprehensiveness Gap for Deep Research Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20975/) (2026)
- [Conformal Linguistic Calibration: Trading-off between Factuality and Specificity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19110/) (2025)
- [LoGU: Long-form Generation with Uncertainty Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14309/) (2024)
- [LoVeC: Reinforcement Learning for Better Verbalized Confidence in Long-Form Generations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23912/) (2025)
- [Verifying the Verifiers: Unveiling Pitfalls and Potentials in Fact Verifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13342/) (2025)
- [UNCLE: Benchmarking Uncertainty Expressions in Long-Form Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16922/) (2025)
- [HalluHard: A Hard Multi-Turn Hallucination Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.01031/) (2026)
- [Language Models Can Predict Their Own Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13329/) (2025)
- [Too Late to Recall: Explaining the Two-Hop Problem in Multimodal Knowledge Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.03276/) (2025)
- [To Call or Not to Call: A Framework to Assess and Optimize LLM Tool Calling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.00737/) (2026)
- [ThoughtTrace: Understanding User Thoughts in Real-World LLM Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.20087/) (2026)
- [All Claims Are Equal, but Some Claims Are More Equal Than Others: Importance-Sensitive Factuality Evaluation of LLM Generations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.07083/) (2025)
- [ErrorMap and ErrorAtlas: Charting the Failure Landscape of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.15812/) (2026)
- [Balancing Truthfulness and Informativeness with Uncertainty-Aware Instruction Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11962/) (2025)
- [Rare Disease Differential Diagnosis with Large Language Models at Scale: From Abdominal Actinomycosis to Wilson's Disease](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15069/) (2025)
- [Context-Aware Human Behavior Prediction Using Multimodal Large Language Models: Challenges and Insights](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00839/) (2025)
- [Leveraging LLM Parametric Knowledge for Fact Checking without Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.05471/) (2026)
- [Understanding Why Language Models Hallucinate: Testing Reasoning Against Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00447/) (2026)
- [Audited Reasoning Refinement: Fine-Tuning Language Models via LLM-Guided Step-Wise Evaluation and Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12476/) (2025)
- [The Chronicles of RiDiC: Generating Datasets with Controlled Popularity Distribution for Long-form Factuality Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.00019/) (2026)
- [Does Finetuning with Scientific Data Increase Hallucinations? A Multi-domain Factuality Evaluation of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.21359/) (2026)
- [Per-Entity Bias Mapping for AI Visibility: Why Brand Mentions Require Entity-Specific Calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.21595/) (2026)
- [Reliability Scales Inversely: Hallucinations Snowball Faster in Bigger Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.18292/) (2026)
- [Stick to What You Know: A Study of Knowledge-Aligned Supervised Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.30987/) (2026)
- [FrankenReport: Early Exiting in Long-Form Generation Using Expected Value of Computation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.06320/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While hallucinations of large language models (LLMs) prevail as a major challenge, existing evaluation benchmarks on factuality do not cover the diverse domains of knowledge that the real-world users of LLMs seek information about. To bridge this gap, we introduce WildHallucinations, a benchmark that evaluates factuality. It does so by prompting LLMs to generate information about entities mined from user-chatbot conversations in the wild. These generations are then automatically fact-checked against a systematically curated knowledge source collected from web search. Notably, half of these real-world entities do not have associated Wikipedia pages. We evaluate 118,785 generations from 15 LLMs on 7,919 entities. We find that LLMs consistently hallucinate more on entities without Wikipedia pages and exhibit varying hallucination rates across different domains. Finally, given the same base models, adding a retrieval component only slightly reduces hallucinations but does not eliminate hallucinations.