# Multi-stage Prompt Refinement for Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12032 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12032/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [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)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17651/) (2023)
- [QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14314/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.18223/) (2023)
- [Qwen2 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10671/) (2024)
- [Learn to Explain: Multimodal Reasoning via Thought Chains for Science Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09513/) (2022)
- [Phi-3 Technical Report: A Highly Capable Language Model Locally on Your Phone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14219/) (2024)
- [PaLM 2 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10403/) (2023)
- [SelfCheckGPT: Zero-Resource Black-Box Hallucination Detection for Generative Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08896/) (2023)
- [Distilling Step-by-Step! Outperforming Larger Language Models with Less Training Data and Smaller Model Sizes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02301/) (2023)
- [Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for Large Models: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14608/) (2024)
- [Textbooks Are All You Need II: phi-1.5 technical report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05463/) (2023)
- [Larger language models do in-context learning differently](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03846/) (2023)
- [Magpie: Alignment Data Synthesis from Scratch by Prompting Aligned LLMs with Nothing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08464/) (2024)
- [Chain-of-Verification Reduces Hallucination in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11495/) (2023)
- [Teaching Small Language Models to Reason](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08410/) (2022)
- [Detecting and Preventing Hallucinations in Large Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06394/) (2023)
- [LLM Lies: Hallucinations are not Bugs, but Features as Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01469/) (2023)
- [Assisting in Writing Wikipedia-like Articles From Scratch with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14207/) (2024)
- [On the Origin of Hallucinations in Conversational Models: Is it the Datasets or the Models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07931/) (2022)
- [DRESS: Instructing Large Vision-Language Models to Align and Interact with Humans via Natural Language Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10081/) (2023)
- [RLHF Deciphered: A Critical Analysis of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback for LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08555/) (2024)
- [Knowledge-Augmented Reasoning Distillation for Small Language Models in Knowledge-Intensive Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18395/) (2023)
- [PRewrite: Prompt Rewriting with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08189/) (2024)
- [Are Large Language Models Good Prompt Optimizers?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02101/) (2024)
- [Identifying Well-formed Natural Language Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09419/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Retrieval Augmented Generation of Literature-derived Polymer Knowledge: The Example of a Biodegradable Polymer Expert System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.16650/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have shown strong performance in natural language understanding and generation tasks. However, LLMs continue to encounter challenges with hallucinations, where models generate plausible but incorrect information. While several factors contribute to hallucinations, the impact of ill-formed prompts, prompts with ambiguous wording, incorrect grammar, or incomplete information, was relatively under explored. To address this, we introduce Multi-stage Prompt Refinement (MPR), a framework designed to systematically improve these ill-formed prompts across multiple stages. Each stage addresses specific errors such as punctuation, typographical mistakes, and misuse of key terms, using small language models (SLMs) fine-tuned for these tasks. MPR iteratively enhances the clarity of prompts with additional context and employs a self-reflection mechanism with ranking to prioritize the most relevant input. Experimental results on hallucination benchmarks show that prompts refined by MPR achieve over an 85~% win rate compared to their original forms, demonstrating its effectiveness in reducing hallucinations and improving LLM output accuracy. Interestingly, we reveal that MPR can be combined with existing post-hoc hallucination mitigation frameworks, further enhancing its versatility. MPR provides a lightweight and adaptable solution for enhancing LLM reliability across various domains.