通过隐藏状态轨迹几何检测推理中的首次幻觉,实现单次前向传播定位错误步骤。
Where Does Reasoning Break? Step-Level Hallucination Detection via Hidden-State Transport Geometry

- 用对比PCA构建轨迹的几何透镜,基于七维几何特征逐步评分
- 在多个数据集上首次错误定位准确率超基线模型,且仅需一次推理
- 适合需要高精度错误定位的复杂推理系统部署
大语言模型在多步推理中会产生幻觉,但现有检测方法多为全程打分,无法定位首个错误,且常需多次采样。本文将幻觉视为单次前向传播中隐藏状态轨迹的属性:正确推理沿局部一致的流形稳定演进,首个错误表现为运输成本偏离该流形的局部偏移。提出一种标签条件教师模型,构建特定轨迹的对比PCA透镜,以七个几何过渡特征对每一步进行评分;并训练一个无需推理时标签的可部署BiLSTM学生模型,直接处理原始隐藏状态。理论证明对比PCA是运输分离目标下的最优投影,且单次前向传播定位首个错误成立的条件是首个错误产生的运输裕度为正。在ProcessBench、PRM800K、HaluEval和TruthfulQA上,两模型在域内均优于熵、探针和注意力基线;教师模型跨模型与数据集转移稳定,而学生模型在分布偏移下性能崩溃,这与我们的蒸馏理论预测一致。结果表明,步骤级幻觉检测本质是轨迹动力学问题,其部署核心障碍在于分布偏移下保持对比运输裕度。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Large language models hallucinate during multi-step reasoning, but most existing detectors operate at the trace level: they assign one confidence score to a full output, fail to localize the first error, and often require multiple sampled completions. We frame hallucination instead as a property of the hidden-state trajectory produced during a single forward pass. Correct reasoning moves through a stable manifold of locally coherent transitions; a first error appears as a localized excursion in transport cost away from this manifold. We operationalize this view with a label-conditioned teacher that builds a trace-specific contrastive PCA lens and scores each step with seven geometric transition features, and a deployable BiLSTM student distilled from the teacher that operates on raw hidden states without inference-time labels. We prove that contrastive PCA is the optimal projection for a transport-separation objective between first error and correct states, and that single-pass first error localization holds whenever the first error creates a positive transport margin over preceding correct transitions. On ProcessBench, PRM800K, HaluEval, and TruthfulQA, both models outperform entropy-based, probing-based, and attention-based baselines in-domain; the teacher transfers stably across language models and datasets, while the student collapses under shift, a gap our distillation theory predicts. These results recast step-level hallucination detection as a problem of trajectory dynamics and identify the central obstacle to deployment: preserving the contrastive transport margin under distribution shift.
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