PhantomBench: Benchmarking the Non-existential Threat of Language Models

Large language models generate fluent text that can contain unfaithful claims -- a phenomenon known as hallucination. We present a multi-signal detection pipeline combining fine-tuned DeBERTa-v3 classification, Monte Carlo (MC) Dropout uncertainty quantification, and temperature-scaled calibration for response-level hallucination detection. Evaluated on the HaluEval benchmark, our pipeline achieves F1=0.915 and AUROC=0.977 on general-domain tasks, with per-task F1 scores of 0.97 (QA), 0.96 (Summarization), and 0.82 (Dialogue). MC Dropout inference further improves accuracy to 93.2%. A context ablation study confirms the model performs genuine entailment reasoning rather than exploiting surface patterns, with summarization F1 dropping 24% when knowledge context is removed. Learning curve analysis reveals that 25% of training data captures 77% of full-data performance. Beyond detection, we apply Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to a Qwen2.5-0.5B generator, reducing its hallucination rate from 85.5% to 37.7% (55.9% relative reduction) as measured by our detector. Cross-domain evaluation on the SciFact biomedical benchmark shows that general-domain training transfers poorly (F1=0.52), motivating domain-specific fine-tuning. PubMedBERT fine-tuned on SciFact achieves F1=0.63 and AUROC=0.81, demonstrating that domain-matched pre-training is the strongest adaptation strategy. Code and models are available at https://github.com/varunteja99/hallucination-detection-nlp

Hallucination remains a central failure mode of large language models, but existing benchmarks operationalize it inconsistently across summarization, question answering, retrieval-augmented generation, and agentic interaction. This fragmentation makes it unclear whether a mitigation that works in one setting reduces hallucinations across contexts. Current benchmarks either require human annotation and fixed references that may be memorized, or rely on observations in settings that are difficult to reproduce. To study root causes, we introduce HalluWorld, an extensible benchmark grounded in an explicit reference-world formulation: a model hallucinates when it produces an observable claim that is false with respect to this world. Building on this view, we construct synthetic and semi-synthetic environments in which the reference world is fully specified, the model's view is controlled, and hallucination labels are generated automatically. HalluWorld spans gridworlds, chess, and realistic terminal tasks, enabling controlled variation of world complexity, observability, temporal change, and source-conflict policy, and disentangling hallucinations into fine-grained error categories. We evaluate frontier and open-weight language models across these settings and find consistent patterns: perceptual hallucination on directly observed information is near-solved for frontier models, while multi-step state tracking and causal forward simulation remain difficult and are not generally solved by extended thinking. In the terminal setting, models also struggle with when to abstain. The uneven profile of failures across probe types and domains suggests that hallucinations arise from distinct failure modes rather than a single capability. Our results suggest that controlled reference worlds offer a scalable and reproducible path toward measuring and reducing hallucinations in modern language models.

Despite Bengali being the sixth most spoken language in the world, no prior work has systematically evaluated hallucination in large language models (LLMs) for Bengali. We introduce BenHalluEval, a fine-grained hallucination evaluation framework for Bengali covering four tasks: Generative Question Answering (GQA), Bangla-English Code-Mixed QA, Summarization, and Reasoning. We construct 12,000 hallucinated candidates using GPT-5.4 across twelve task-specific hallucination types, drawn from three existing Bengali datasets, and evaluate seven LLMs spanning reasoning-oriented, multilingual, and Bengali-centric categories under a dual-track protocol that independently measures false-positive rate on ground-truth instances (Track A) and hallucination detection rate on hallucinated candidates (Track B). To jointly penalise both failure modes and prevent inflated scores from uniform response bias, we propose BenHalluScore, a dual-track calibration metric that ranges from 7.72% to 55.42% across models and tasks, revealing substantial variation in hallucination calibration. Chain-of-thought prompting, applied as a mitigation strategy, shifts response distributions without consistently improving hallucination discrimination. BenHalluEval establishes the first dedicated hallucination benchmark for Bengali and highlights the inadequacy of single-track and prompting-only evaluation approaches for low-resource language settings. The dataset and code are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/BanglaHalluEval-EB77.