Attention Dispersion as a Diagnostic Signal for Hallucination in Large Language Models

arXiv:2609.18320 · cs.CL, cs.LG · Submitted 2026-09-16 · Read on arXiv

cs.CL, cs.LG

Submitted: 2026-09-16

Updated: 2026-09-16

Comments: 6 pages, 2 figures, 1 table

License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/

Terminology

• Hallucination — 23× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• AUC — 10× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Benchmark — 10× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Attention Entropy — 9× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Hallucination Detection — 7× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Alignment — 6× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Large Language Model — 6× in this paper
• Transformer — 6× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Attention Mechanism — 5× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Calibration — 5× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
• Large Language Models (LLMs) — 3× in this paper · explained in 6 episodes
• Trace — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Alignment Techniques — 2× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Consistency — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Epistemic Uncertainty — 2× in this paper · explained in 9 episodes
• Feature Extraction — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Self-consistency — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Failure Modes — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Generalizability — 1× in this paper · explained in 6 episodes
• Generative AI — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Interpretability — 1× in this paper · explained in 15 episodes
• Large Language Model (LLM) — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Reinforcement Learning — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Robustness — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Uncertainty Quantification — 1× in this paper · explained in 8 episodes
• Verifier — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes

Sources

• The Internal State of an LLM Knows When It's Lying
• Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems
• A Baseline for Detecting Misclassified and Out-of-Distribution Examples in Neural Networks
• Language Models (Mostly) Know What They Know
• Semantic Entropy Probes: Robust and Cheap Hallucination Detection in LLMs
• Taming Overconfidence in LLMs: Reward Calibration in RLHF
• Let's Verify Step by Step
• Teaching Models to Express Their Uncertainty in Words
• Scikit-learn: Machine Learning in Python
• Layer by Layer: Uncovering Hidden Representations in Language Models
• Just Ask for Calibration: Strategies for Eliciting Calibrated Confidence Scores from Language Models Fine-Tuned with Human Feedback
• Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models
• Qwen2 Technical Report

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