# The Case for Repeatable, Open, and Expert-Grounded Hallucination Benchmarks in Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.17345 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17345/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Survey of Hallucination in Natural Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03629/) (2022)
- [Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04615/) (2022)
- [Language Models as Knowledge Bases?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01066/) (2019)
- [A Survey on Hallucination in Large Language Models: Principles, Taxonomy, Challenges, and Open Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05232/) (2023)
- [Don't Give Me the Details, Just the Summary! Topic-Aware Convolutional Neural Networks for Extreme Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08745/) (2018)
- [Model Cards for Model Reporting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.03993/) (2018)
- [Teaching Machines to Read and Comprehend](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03340/) (2015)
- [On Faithfulness and Factuality in Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00661/) (2020)
- [Teaching Models to Express Their Uncertainty in Words](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14334/) (2022)
- [HaluEval: A Large-Scale Hallucination Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11747/) (2023)
- [Challenges in Data-to-Document Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.08052/) (2017)
- [BIG-Bench Extra Hard](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19187/) (2025)
- [GeomVerse: A Systematic Evaluation of Large Models for Geometric Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12241/) (2023)
- [Medical Hallucinations in Foundation Models and Their Impact on Healthcare](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05777/) (2025)
- [The Dawn After the Dark: An Empirical Study on Factuality Hallucination in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03205/) (2024)
- [FELM: Benchmarking Factuality Evaluation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00741/) (2023)
- [BoardgameQA: A Dataset for Natural Language Reasoning with Contradictory Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07934/) (2023)
- [AboutMe: Using Self-Descriptions in Webpages to Document the Effects of English Pretraining Data Filters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06408/) (2024)
- [How well do LLMs cite relevant medical references? An evaluation framework and analyses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02008/) (2024)
- [Hallucination Mitigation using Agentic AI Natural Language-Based Frameworks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13946/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Plausible, but inaccurate, tokens in model-generated text are widely believed to be pervasive and problematic for the responsible adoption of language models. Despite this concern, there is little scientific work that attempts to measure the prevalence of language model hallucination in a comprehensive way. In this paper, we argue that language models should be evaluated using repeatable, open, and domain-contextualized hallucination benchmarking. We present a taxonomy of hallucinations alongside a case study that demonstrates that when experts are absent from the early stages of data creation, the resulting hallucination metrics lack validity and practical utility.