How Much Do LLMs Hallucinate in Document Q&A Scenarios? A 172-Billion-Token Study Across Temperatures, Context Lengths, and Hardware Platforms
arxiv.org

Evaluating 35 open-weight models across three context lengths (32K, 128K, 200K), four temperatures, and three hardware platforms—consuming 172 billion tokens across more than 4,000 runs—we find that the answer is “substantially, and unavoidably.” Even under optimal conditions—best model, best temperature, temperature chosen specifically to minimize fabrication—the floor is non-zero and rises steeply with context length. At 32K, the best model (GLM 4.5) fabricates 1.19% of answers, top-tier models fabricate 5–7%, and the median model fabricates roughly 25%.

    • deranger@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      Paredolia just means seeing patterns that aren’t there, it’s not implicitly human. If you see a dog in the clouds, that’s paredolia.

      • Telorand@reddthat.comEnglish
        1·
        24 hours ago

        Great, when did I say otherwise? Pareidolia is a thing humans do, because we like patterns. Finding patterns is something that has benefited our species, but it is sometimes so strong that we see faces in electrical outlets or the shape of a car’s front profile (for example).