arXiv subjects

Tansheng Zhu

Publications and source records attributed to Tansheng Zhu.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

When Bias Pretends to Be Truth: How Spurious Correlations Undermine Hallucination Detection in LLMs

Despite substantial advances, large language models (LLMs) continue to exhibit hallucinations, generating plausible yet incorrect responses. In this paper, we highlight a critical yet previously underexplored class of hallucinations driven by spurious correlations -- superficial but statistically prominent associations between features (e.g., surnames) and attributes (e.g., nationality) present in the training data. We demonstrate that these spurious correlations induce hallucinations that are confidently generated, immune to model scaling, evade current detection methods, and persist even after refusal fine-tuning. Through systematically controlled synthetic experiments and empirical evaluations on state-of-the-art open-source and proprietary LLMs (including GPT-5), we show that existing hallucination detection methods, such as confidence-based filtering and inner-state probing, fundamentally fail in the presence of spurious correlations. Our theoretical analysis further elucidates why these statistical biases intrinsically undermine confidence-based detection techniques. Our findings thus emphasize the urgent need for new approaches explicitly designed to address hallucinations caused by spurious correlations.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

AdaRoPE: Not All Attention Heads Should Rotate and Scale Equally

Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) is widely adopted in Transformers to encode positional information, yet standard implementations enforce a uniform frequency schedule and scaling across all attention heads. Using simplified retrieval tasks and length generalization scenarios, we show -- both empirically and theoretically -- that heads with different functional roles require distinct frequency ranges and attention scaling factors to operate effectively. Ignoring this structure leads to suboptimal utilization of embedding dimensions and degraded performance, particularly under long-context settings. To address these limitations, we propose AdaRoPE, which equips each attention head with learnable rotation frequencies and attention scaling factors. Pretrained LLMs with AdaRoPE consistently outperform existing RoPE variants, including partial RoPE and NoPE baselines. For context extension, we further show that uniform frequency and attention scaling, used in methods such as YaRN, are suboptimal. By applying head-specific scaling, AdaRoPE enables better context extension while better preserving short-context performance in both the extrapolation setting and the long-context continued pretraining setting. These results highlight the importance of optimizing rotary position embedding at the level of individual attention heads.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Bayesian Optimization by Kernel Regression and Density-based Exploration

Bayesian optimization is highly effective for optimizing expensive-to-evaluate black-box functions, but it faces significant computational challenges due to the cubic per-iteration cost of Gaussian processes, which results in a total time complexity that is quartic with respect to the number of iterations. To address this limitation, we propose a novel algorithm, Bayesian optimization by kernel regression and density-based exploration (BOKE). BOKE uses kernel regression for efficient function approximation, kernel density for exploration, and integrates them into the confidence bound criteria to guide the optimization process, thus reducing computational costs to quadratic. Our theoretical analysis rigorously establishes the global convergence of BOKE under noisy evaluations. Through extensive numerical experiments on both synthetic and real-world optimization tasks, we demonstrate that BOKE not only performs competitively compared to Gaussian process-based methods and several other baseline methods but also exhibits superior computational efficiency. These results highlight BOKE's effectiveness in resource-constrained environments, providing a practical approach for optimization problems in engineering applications.

math.OC↗