Can Humans Dream of Electric Sheep? Human-Written Samples for Fine-Grained Vision-and-Language Hallucination Benchmarking
Authors: Timothee Mickus, Claudio Savelli, Eduardo Calò, Emilio Raimond, Stella Frank, Hengyu Luo, Flavio Giobergia, Vincent Segonne, +5 more
Abstract
In an age of rapid model turnover, how do we make hallucination evaluation more perennial? We explore whether human-written hallucination samples could take the place of model-generated hallucinations, in order to make benchmarking detection independent of particular models. To this end, we construct a dataset of 1,600 human-written samples, spanning four languages (Chinese, English, French, Italian), and 18,400 samples from five vision-and-language models, all annotated for hallucinations using a fine-grained span-level labeling scheme. We find that human-written samples result in higher agreement and allow greater control of dataset contents, while remaining distributionally similar to samples derived from vision-and-language samples and providing a reasonable portrayal of detection capabilities - suggesting that human data is a viable substitute for model-based hallucination benchmarks.
Most hallucination evaluations focus on English, leaving it unclear whether findings transfer to lower-resource languages. We investigate faithfulness hallucinations, defined as model-generated content that is fluent and plausible but diverges from the provided input or is internally inconsistent. Leveraging the multilingual MultiWikiQA dataset, we utilize the LettuceDetect framework to create synthetic hallucination datasets for 306 languages, from which we train token-level hallucination classifiers for 30 European languages. In this work, we present evaluations of model hallucinations on a selection of languages: English, Danish, German, and Icelandic. Using these classifiers, we evaluate the hallucination rates for Qwen3-0.6B, Qwen3-14B, Gemma-3-12B-IT, cogito-v1-preview-qwen-32B, and cogito-v1-preview-llama-70B. Our classifiers reveal notably higher hallucination rates for Qwen3-0.6B (up to 60% of answers containing at least one hallucination, peaking in Icelandic) and generally lower rates for larger models, with cogito-v1-preview-qwen-32B and cogito-v1-preview-llama-70B performing best on most languages. Hallucination rates are consistently higher for lower-resource languages, particularly Icelandic.
Hallucination detection is essential for the reliable deployment of large language models (LLMs). However, existing evaluations face two core challenges: inconsistent inference configuration and evaluation, and limited coverage of downstream domains and tasks. Consequently, reported detector performance is often difficult to compare, reproduce, and generalize beyond specific experimental settings. We introduce OpenHalDet, a unified benchmark for hallucination detection across diverse generation scenarios. OpenHalDet standardizes the evaluation pipeline, from prompt construction and response generation to truthfulness annotation, detector scoring, and metric computation. It supports heterogeneous detector families under different access settings, including black-box methods that use only generated outputs, gray-box methods that rely on probability-based signals, and white-box methods that exploit internal model signals. By bringing diverse tasks, models, and detectors into a shared framework, OpenHalDet enables controlled comparison and provides a systematic view of how different detection paradigms behave in LLM applications. We release OpenHalDet as an open and extensible codebase to facilitate reproducible evaluation and future development of hallucination detection methods. The code and datasets are available at https://github.com/Nellie179/Hallucination-Detection.
Large language models (LLMs) hallucinate with confidence: their outputs can be fluent, authoritative, and simply wrong. In medical, legal, and scientific applications this failure causes direct harm, and detecting it from internal model states offers a path to safer deployment. A growing body of work reports that this problem is increasingly tractable, with recent methods achieving high detection performance on widely used benchmarks. We show, however, that much of this apparent progress does not survive scrutiny. Four of the six corpora embed the ground-truth answer directly in the input prompt. A naïve text-similarity baseline we call \textsc{TxTemb} exploits this to achieve near-perfect detection scores without any access to model internals. To measure what genuine detection capability remains once these artifacts are controlled, we conduct a large-scale evaluation spanning twenty-two detection methods, twelve open-source models spanning six architectural families, and six corpora. We further introduce \textbf{DRIFT}, a supervised probe over inter-layer hidden-state transitions, as a point of comparison for live-generation detection. Our findings suggest that the field's reported progress on hallucination detection is substantially explained by benchmark construction artifacts in widely used corpora, and that the majority of established baselines perform near chance under controlled conditions; the consistent exceptions are SAPLMA and DRIFT, both supervised probes on upper-layer hidden states.