# Monitoring Decoding: Mitigating Hallucination via Evaluating the Factuality of Partial Response during Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.03106 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03106/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17651/) (2023)
- [TriviaQA: A Large Scale Distantly Supervised Challenge Dataset for Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03551/) (2017)
- [Gemma 2: Improving Open Language Models at a Practical Size](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00118/) (2024)
- [Language Models (Mostly) Know What They Know](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05221/) (2022)
- [Fast Inference from Transformers via Speculative Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.17192/) (2022)
- [Inference-Time Intervention: Eliciting Truthful Answers from a Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03341/) (2023)
- [Language Models Don't Always Say What They Think: Unfaithful Explanations in Chain-of-Thought Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04388/) (2023)
- [Large Language Monkeys: Scaling Inference Compute with Repeated Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21787/) (2024)
- [Latent Retrieval for Weakly Supervised Open Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00300/) (2019)
- [Mitigating Hallucination in Large Multi-Modal Models via Robust Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14565/) (2023)
- [Universal Self-Consistency for Large Language Model Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17311/) (2023)
- [Sources of Hallucination by Large Language Models on Inference Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14552/) (2023)
- [A Token-level Reference-free Hallucination Detection Benchmark for Free-form Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08704/) (2021)
- [Pride and Prejudice: LLM Amplifies Self-Bias in Self-Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11436/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Uncertainty-Based Hallucination Detection with Stronger Focus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13230/) (2023)
- [HaloScope: Harnessing Unlabeled LLM Generations for Hallucination Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17504/) (2024)
- [SAC3: Reliable Hallucination Detection in Black-Box Language Models via Semantic-aware Cross-check Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01740/) (2023)
- [TreeBoN: Enhancing Inference-Time Alignment with Speculative Tree-Search and Best-of-N Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16033/) (2024)
- [Do LLMs Know about Hallucination? An Empirical Investigation of LLM's Hidden States](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09733/) (2024)
- [Integrate the Essence and Eliminate the Dross: Fine-Grained Self-Consistency for Free-Form Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02056/) (2024)
- [TruthFlow: Truthful LLM Generation via Representation Flow Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.04556/) (2025)
- [Integrative Decoding: Improve Factuality via Implicit Self-consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01556/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Large Language Models Hallucination: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06265/) (2025)
- [Do I Really Know? Learning Factual Self-Verification for Hallucination Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02018/) (2026)
- [Micro-Macro Retrieval: Reducing Long-Form Hallucination in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28828/) (2026)
- [Look Before You Leap: Factual Decoding with Internal Attribution Signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.15745/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While large language models have demonstrated exceptional performance across a wide range of tasks, they remain susceptible to hallucinations -- generating plausible yet factually incorrect contents. Existing methods to mitigating such risk often rely on sampling multiple full-length generations, which introduces significant response latency and becomes ineffective when the model consistently produces hallucinated outputs with high confidence. To address these limitations, we introduce Monitoring Decoding (MD), a novel framework that dynamically monitors the generation process and selectively applies in-process interventions, focusing on revising crucial tokens responsible for hallucinations. Instead of waiting until completion of multiple full-length generations, we identify hallucination-prone tokens during generation using a monitor function, and further refine these tokens through a tree-based decoding strategy. This approach ensures an enhanced factual accuracy and coherence in the generated output while maintaining efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that MD consistently outperforms self-consistency-based approaches in both effectiveness and efficiency, achieving higher factual accuracy while significantly reducing computational overhead.