Hallucination Neurons and Where to Find Them: An Investigation into the existence of Hallucination Neurons

arXiv:2609.29781 · cs.AI · Submitted 2026-09-24 · Read on arXiv

cs.AI

Submitted: 2026-09-24

Updated: 2026-09-24

Code: https://github.com/huseyincavusbi/hprobes-protocol

Terminology

• Hallucination — 25× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Interpretability — 14× in this paper · explained in 15 episodes
• Accuracy — 9× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Regularization — 7× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Transformer — 5× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Generalization — 3× in this paper · explained in 13 episodes
• Ablation — 2× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Adaptation — 2× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Alignment — 2× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Core — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Failure Modes — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Fine-Tuning — 2× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Sparsity — 2× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Steering — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Affordance — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Aggregation — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Benchmark — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Feature Extraction — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Hallucination Detection — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Large Language Models (LLMs) — 1× in this paper · explained in 6 episodes
• Pruning — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Sycophancy — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes

Sources

• Towards Understanding Safety Alignment: A Mechanistic Perspective from Safety Neurons
• H-Neurons: On the Existence, Impact, and Origin of Hallucination-Associated Neurons in LLMs
• Towards A Rigorous Science of Interpretable Machine Learning
• Towards Understanding Multi-Task Learning (Generalization) of LLMs via Detecting and Exploring Task-Specific Neurons

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