# Principled Detection of Hallucinations in Large Language Models via Multiple Testing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18473 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18473/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05530/) (2024)
- [TriviaQA: A Large Scale Distantly Supervised Challenge Dataset for Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03551/) (2017)
- [Survey of Hallucination in Natural Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03629/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Hallucination in Large Language Models: Principles, Taxonomy, Challenges, and Open Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05232/) (2023)
- [A Simple Unified Framework for Detecting Out-of-Distribution Samples and Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03888/) (2018)
- [DeepSeek-V2: A Strong, Economical, and Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04434/) (2024)
- [Qwen2.5-Math Technical Report: Toward Mathematical Expert Model via Self-Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12122/) (2024)
- [Towards Understanding Sycophancy in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13548/) (2023)
- [Are NLP Models really able to Solve Simple Math Word Problems?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07191/) (2021)
- [Semantic Uncertainty: Linguistic Invariances for Uncertainty Estimation in Natural Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09664/) (2023)
- [SelfCheckGPT: Zero-Resource Black-Box Hallucination Detection for Generative Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08896/) (2023)
- [CTRL: A Conditional Transformer Language Model for Controllable Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05858/) (2019)
- [CoQA: A Conversational Question Answering Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.07042/) (2018)
- [Benchmarking Large Language Models for News Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13848/) (2023)
- [How Language Model Hallucinations Can Snowball](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13534/) (2023)
- [Generating with Confidence: Uncertainty Quantification for Black-box Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19187/) (2023)
- [FacTool: Factuality Detection in Generative AI -- A Tool Augmented Framework for Multi-Task and Multi-Domain Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13528/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Quality Estimation for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10608/) (2020)
- [A Stitch in Time Saves Nine: Detecting and Mitigating Hallucinations of LLMs by Validating Low-Confidence Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03987/) (2023)
- [LLM Lies: Hallucinations are not Bugs, but Features as Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01469/) (2023)
- [Kernel Language Entropy: Fine-grained Uncertainty Quantification for LLMs from Semantic Similarities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20003/) (2024)
- [Detecting Hallucinated Content in Conditional Neural Sequence Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02593/) (2020)
- [ChatGPT as a Factual Inconsistency Evaluator for Text Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15621/) (2023)
- [Entity Cloze By Date: What LMs Know About Unseen Entities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02832/) (2022)
- [Hallucination Detection in Large Language Models with Metamorphic Relations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15844/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [HalluGuard: Demystifying Data-Driven and Reasoning-Driven Hallucinations in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.18753/) (2026)
- [Confidence over Time: Confidence Calibration with Temporal Logic for Large Language Model Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.13387/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful foundational models to solve a variety of tasks, they have also been shown to be prone to hallucinations, i.e., generating responses that sound confident but are actually incorrect or even nonsensical. Existing hallucination detectors propose a wide range of empirical scoring rules, but their performance varies across models and datasets, and it is hard to determine which ones to rely on in practice or to treat as a reliable detector. In this work, we formulate the problem of detecting hallucinations as a hypothesis testing problem and draw parallels with the problem of out-of-distribution detection in machine learning models. We then propose a multiple-testing-inspired method that systematically aggregates multiple evaluation scores via conformal p-values, enabling calibrated detection with controlled false alarm rate. Extensive experiments across diverse models and datasets validate the robustness of our approach against state-of-the-art methods.