# External Observers May See More Clearly: Cross-Model Span-Level Hallucination Detection in Large Language Models via Hidden State Probing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02066 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.02066/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Hallucination detection and mitigation, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 11 of its 15 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Oct 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Hallucination detection and mitigation](https://mlsanity.com/lr/hallucination-detection-and-mitigation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Gemma 2: Improving Open Language Models at a Practical Size](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00118/) (2024)
- [FActScore: Fine-grained Atomic Evaluation of Factual Precision in Long Form Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14251/) (2023)
- [TinyLlama: An Open-Source Small Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02385/) (2024)
- [SmolLM2: When Smol Goes Big -- Data-Centric Training of a Small Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02737/) (2025)
- [RAGTruth: A Hallucination Corpus for Developing Trustworthy Retrieval-Augmented Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00396/) (2023)
- [Semantic Entropy Probes: Robust and Cheap Hallucination Detection in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15927/) (2024)
- [ICR Probe: Tracking Hidden State Dynamics for Reliable Hallucination Detection in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16488/) (2025)
- [Beyond Token Probes: Hallucination Detection via Activation Tensors with ACT-ViT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.00296/) (2025)
- [When Models Lie, We Learn: Multilingual Span-Level Hallucination Detection with PsiloQA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.04849/) (2025)
- [Hallucinated Span Detection with Multi-View Attention Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04335/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly serve as foundational reasoning engines, their tendency to hallucinate remains a critical vulnerability. While recent internal state probes offer a promising alternative to slow external retrieval systems, they largely reduce hallucination detection to a token-wise binary classification task, failing to capture the structured, sequential boundaries of semantic drift. Here, we introduce an internal hidden state framework for fine-grained, span-level hallucination detection. By inspecting layer-wise activation patterns, we attempt to detect the exact hallucination onset and continuation tokens in an LLM generation. Our experiments show that this approach successfully isolates hallucination onsets, achieving substantial improvements in Precision-Recall AUC over random baselines despite extreme class imbalance. Ultimately, we propose a novel cross-model detection framework in which one model observes the internal representations elicited by another model's generation. We find that an external observer can match or exceed a generator's self-detection of its own hallucination onsets, including when the observer is the smaller model, suggesting that self-detection is not the ceiling for onset localisation.