LLM Hallucination Detection: HSAD

Abstract

Although Large Language Models have demonstrated powerful capabilities in a wide range of tasks such as language understanding and code generation, the frequent occurrence of hallucinations during the generation process has become a significant impediment to their deployment in critical application scenarios. Current mainstream hallucination detection methods rely on factual consistency verification or static hidden layer features. The former is constrained by the scope of knowledge coverage, while the latter struggles to capture reasoning biases during the inference process. To address these issues, and inspired by signal analysis methods in cognitive neuroscience, this paper proposes a hallucination detection method based on the frequency-domain analysis of hidden layer temporal signals, named HSAD (\textbf{H}idden \textbf{S}ignal \textbf{A}nalysis-based \textbf{D}etection). First, by treating the LLM's reasoning process as a cognitive journey that unfolds over time, we propose modeling and simulating the human process of signal perception and discrimination in a deception-detection scenario through hidden layer temporal signals. Next, The Fast Fourier Transform is applied to map these temporal signals into the frequency domain to construct spectral features, which are used to capture anomalies that arise during the reasoning process; analysis experiments on these spectral features have proven the effectiveness of this approach. Finally, a hallucination detection algorithm is designed based on these spectral features to identify hallucinations in the generated content. By effectively combining the modeling of the reasoning process with frequency-domain feature extraction, the HSAD method overcomes the limitations of existing approaches in terms of knowledge coverage and the detection of reasoning biases, demonstrating higher detection accuracy and robustness.