Does the Truthfulness Signal Survive Code-Mixing? Probing Hidden States for Hallucination Detection in Hinglish

Abstract

Hidden-state hallucination probing - training a linear classifier on an LLM's internal activations to detect whether a generated answer is faithful to the input - is an active area of 2026 research, with recent work reporting 0.90-1.00 AUROC across several benchmarks and languages. However, none of this work has tested probes on code-mixed input, despite the fact that a huge population of chatbot users write in Hindi-English code-mixed text ("Hinglish"). We address this gap directly: does a hallucination probe trained on clean-language hidden states transfer to Hinglish, or does the signal degrade under code-mixing? We construct a 5,674-item Hindi/English/Hinglish QA benchmark, generate and label 17,022 model responses across three open-weight 7-8B LLMs (Qwen2.5-7B, Mistral-7B, Llama-3.1-8B), extract per-layer hidden states at two token positions, and train linear and MLP probes for in-distribution detection and cross-lingual transfer. We find that the hallucination signal survives code-mixing well: transfer AUROC ranges from 0.88 to 0.99, with gaps of mostly under 0.05 AUROC relative to in-distribution performance, and that Hindi-trained probes transfer to Hinglish more reliably than English-trained probes. As an independent, practically motivated finding, all three models hallucinate substantially more on Hindi and Hinglish than on English for matched facts. We release our code and synthetic Hinglish QA dataset to support further work on code-mixed hallucination detection.