Large language models (LLMs) frequently generate fluent yet factually incorrect responses, raising concerns about their reliability. Recent hallucination detectors increasingly exploit internal representations, but extracting informative signals from high-dimensional hidden states remains challenging. Existing approaches often rely on selected activations or pooling-based compression, potentially overlooking discriminative information distributed across Transformer layers, feature modes, and tokens. We propose LOTUS (Low-rank Order-statistic TUcker-based Subspace learning), a multilinear low-rank decomposition framework for hallucination detection that extracts compact representations from LLM hidden states while reducing dependence on labeled data. Our approach first summarizes variable-length token representations using complementary statistical descriptors that capture peak activations, activation distributions, and cross-layer changes. We then leverage low-rank multilinear decomposition to extract compact representations that capture the underlying structure of LLM hidden states, which are subsequently used to train a lightweight hallucination classifier. Experiments across multiple LLMs and question-answering benchmarks demonstrate improved hallucination detection performance over recent state-of-the-art baselines.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Overview of our proposed framework LOTUS . Hidden states are summarized across tokens using peak activations, activation quantiles, and cross-layer differences, projected with summary-specific Tucker-2 bases learned from unlabeled activations, and concatenated for lightweight hallucination classification.
Method
NQ-Open
TruthfulQA
TriviaQA
TyDiQA-GP
Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct
Perplexity
57.58
65.36
75.42
55.72
LN-Entropy
63.24
59.61
73.96
68.60
Semantic Entropy
61.91
60.86
63.49
51.60
Lexical Similarity
65.95
58.44
71.09
72.86
EigenScore
62.14
56.24
70.84
63.48
Table 1: Pooled AUROC (%) under the question-level split across two LLMs and four QA benchmarks. Results are averaged over five random trials; mean ± standard deviation is reported for supervised detectors. Best results are in bold.
Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct
LLaMA-3.1-8B
Method
TruthfulQA
TyDiQA-GP
TruthfulQA
TyDiQA-GP
HARP
67.84±2.07
82.69±1.44
67.78±8.05
75.87±1.63
ACT-ViT
78.51±4.51
81.93±1.93
83.50±3.12
80.50±2.34
LOTUS (Ours)
82.07±2.18
88.09±3.77
82.73±1.92
81.34±3.01
Table 2: Within-question AUROC (%) under the question-level split. Results are reported as mean ± standard deviation over five random trials.
AUROC / Δ vs. LOTUS
Configuration
Summaries
NQ-Open
TruthfulQA
TriviaQA
TyDiQA-GP
Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct
LOTUS (full)
C,S,V
79.29
87.83
91.69
87.86
Ablated variants
w/o S
C,V
+0.15
−0.04
−0.23
−0.06
Peak only
C
−0.48
−0.75
−0.41
+0.40
Table 3: The full LOTUS configuration independently projects and concatenates the peak activation ( C ), activation quantile ( S ), and cross-layer difference ( V ) summaries. The LOTUS row reports absolute pooled AUROC (%), while all ablated variants report the change in AUROC relative to LOTUS ( Δ ). Positive values indicate improvement over LOTUS and negative values indicate degradation. Results use the question-level split and are averaged over five random draws.
TruthfulQA
TyDiQA-GP
Method
Pooled
Within
Pooled
Within
Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct → LLaMA-3.1-8B
Target-trained LOTUS
89.22±1.44
82.73
82.47±1.24
81.34
Transfer + alignment
87.44±1.18
80.67
77.26±2.32
78.44
Transfer w/o alignment
63.73±4.93
66.10
48.79±2.31
50.60
LLaMA-3.1-8B → Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct
Table 4: AUROC (%) on the target model under the question-level split. Target-trained uses target labels, while transferred detectors reuse the source classifier with or without unlabeled ridge alignment. Pooled AUROC is mean ± standard deviation over five draws; within-question AUROC is also reported.
Figure 2: Covariance spectra of the peak activation matrix for Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct on TyDiQA-GP, at every layer. (a) effective rank of correct and hallucinated responses, (b) hallucinated-to-correct effective-rank ratio under size-matched and question-paired sampling, and (c) single-layer AUROC. Shaded bands indicate 95% intervals; the gray region marks the LOTUS layer window.
Appendix figures & tables19 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Table 7
Window (blocks)
TruthfulQA
TyDiQA-GP
Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct
3 – 11
87.17
84.93
7 – 15
87.13
87.04
11 – 19
87.52
87.27
13 – 21
87.92
87.48
15 – 23 (reported)
87.50
87.89
Appendix
Table 5: Pooled AUROC (%) under the question-level split, averaged over five different runs. Results are reported across different nine-layer windows while keeping all other settings fixed.
TyDiQA-GP
TruthfulQA
Block
Peak
Range
Peak
Range
Embedding
76.5
77.3
82.3
82.3
0
77.5
78.1
83.9
85.0
1
75.3
79.5
83.7
84.9
2
77.2
78.9
85.4
86.3
3
77.3
80.0
85.8
86.5
Appendix
Table 6: Single-layer AUROC (%) for Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct: the peak or range summary of one layer, projected to 64 features and classified by logistic regression, with question-grouped five-fold cross-validation. Blocks are counted from zero; the rules enclose our window, blocks 15 to 23 .
Figure 3: Comparison of question-level and answer-level splitting with ten responses per question. Question-level splitting keeps all responses from a known question in one partition, whereas answer-level splitting can place responses from the same question in both training and test sets, affecting 92.6% – 95.7% of known questions in our data.
NQ-Open
TruthfulQA
TriviaQA
TyDiQA-GP
Method
Ans.
Δ
Ans.
Δ
Ans.
Δ
Ans.
Δ
Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct
HARP
81.03
+13.30
85.16
+7.62
92.50
+3.75
91.75
+11.85
LOTUS
91.14
+11.85
94.03
+6.20
94.05
+2.36
94.72
+6.86
LLaMA-3.1-8B
HARP
86.56
+6.00
84.84
+5.26
88.08
+5.54
85.65
+10.66
Appendix
Table 7: Pooled AUROC (%) of HARP and LOTUS under the answer-level split (Ans.), and its gain over the question-level split ( Δ = Ans. − question-level AUROC in Table 1 ). ACT-ViT under both splits is in Table 17 . Standard deviations are in Table 16 .
Qwen2.5-7B
LLaMA-3.1-8B
Reduction
Features
Parameters
Multiply-adds
TQA
TyDi
TQA
TyDi
Tucker-2 (LOTUS)
896
1.15 / 1.31
9.9 / 11.3
87.76
87.82
89.22
82.47
Tucker-3, 2 bins, rT=1
896
1.15 / 1.31
19.7 / 22.6
87.86
87.96
89.51
82.67
Tucker-3, 8 bins, rT=8
7,168
1.15 / 1.31
79.1 / 90.3
86.84
87.28
89.20
80.96
Flat PCA
896
45.6 / 52.2
45.6 / 52.2
88.09
87.45
88.42
81.96
Random projection
896
none
45.6 / 52.2
82.87
85.38
84.32
77.24
Appendix
Table 8: Performance comparison of reduction methods using the same random-forest classifier under the question-level split, averaged over five runs on TruthfulQA (TQA) and TyDiQA-GP (TyDi). We report pooled AUROC (%), feature dimension, fitted basis parameters, and projection multiply-adds for Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct / LLaMA-3.1-8B.
Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct
LLaMA-3.1-8B
Reduction
Parameters
TruthfulQA
TyDiQA-GP
TruthfulQA
TyDiQA-GP
Tucker-2 (LOTUS)
1.15M / 1.31M
87.76
87.82
89.22
82.47
Best layer
5.28M / 6.03M
88.05
86.54
89.11
83.12
Layer average
5.28M / 6.03M
87.87
86.97
88.28
80.92
Appendix
Table 9: Single-layer reductions to 896 features with the random forest, under the question-level split: pooled AUROC (%), averaged over five draws. Parameters are the entries of the fitted bases, for Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct / LLaMA-3.1-8B.
Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct
LLaMA-3.1-8B
B
rT
Features
TruthfulQA
TyDiQA-GP
TruthfulQA
TyDiQA-GP
Order statistics within bins (peak, range, update)
1
1
896
87.49
87.88
89.34
82.46
2
1
896
87.86 ( +0.37 )
87.96 ( +0.08 )
89.51 ( +0.17 )
82.67 ( +0.21 )
2
2
1,792
87.30 ( −0.19 )
87.79 ( −0.10 )
89.38 ( +0.03 )
81.81 ( −0.65 )
4
2
1,792
87.50 ( +0.01 )
88.07 ( +0.18 )
89.55 ( +0.20 )
81.82 ( −0.65 )
Appendix
Table 10: Tucker-3 with B token bins and token rank rT , with the random forest, under the question-level split: pooled AUROC (%), averaged over five draws, and in parentheses the difference from one bin of the same pooling over the same draws. Features are passed to the classifier.
Setting
5%
10%
25%
50%
100%
Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct
TruthfulQA
Tucker-2
77.10
81.32
84.89
86.12
87.76
flat PCA
+0.09†
+0.64
−1.85
−0.71
+0.33
TyDiQA-GP
Tucker-2
74.05
84.00
85.01
86.31
87.82
flat PCA
−0.18†
−5.06†
−1.33
−1.57
−0.38
LLaMA-3.1-8B
Appendix
Table 11: Reducing the number of labeled training questions, with the test sets held fixed and both reductions refit on each run. For each setting the first row is the pooled AUROC (%) of the Tucker-2 core, averaged over five runs, and the second is the difference of flat PCA of the same width from it, in AUROC points; negative values are below the core. The last row averages the four differences. † At these sizes flat PCA cannot supply all 896 features, since each summary yields at most one component per training response.
Configuration
Summaries
Features
NQ-Open
TruthfulQA
TriviaQA
TyDiQA-GP
Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct
LOTUS (full)
C,S,V
896
69.24
80.16
92.48
84.09
Ablated variants
w/o S
C,V
576
68.01
81.17
92.56
81.92
Peak only
C
320
71.85
81.80
92.44
80.99
Quantile only
S
320
70.43
82.07
92.69
82.82
Appendix
Table 12: Pooled AUROC (%) for LOTUS and its ablated variants using logistic regression under the question-level split. Results are averaged over five random draws.
Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct
LLaMA-3.1-8B
Ranks
Width
TruthfulQA
TyDiQA-GP
TruthfulQA
TyDiQA-GP
k=1 , rF=64
192
88.04
87.41
89.07
81.32
k=2 , rF=64
320
87.88
87.36
89.82
82.75
k=3 , rF=64
512
87.63
87.78
89.45
82.81
k=4 , rF=64
704
87.89
88.03
89.33
82.59
k=5 , rF=64
896
87.76
87.82
89.22
82.47
Appendix
Table 13: Rank sensitivity under the question-level split, averaged over five runs. We vary one rank at a time, and width denotes the number of features per response.
Detector
TruthfulQA
TyDiQA-GP
NQ-Open
TriviaQA
HARP
none: the last layer’s states are recomputed in its own script
ACT-ViT, N=20
8.7 – 10.0
4.7 – 5.4
38.6 – 44.1
106 – 122
ACT-ViT, N=100
43.6 – 49.9
23.5 – 26.9
193 – 220
532 – 608
LOTUS
2.3 – 2.7
1.3 – 1.4
10.4 – 11.8
28.6 – 32.7
Appendix
Table 14: Stored input (GB) per model and dataset, float16 and uncompressed, as a range over Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct and LLaMA-3.1-8B. N denotes ACT-ViT’s number of tokens, where we report N=20 and the released default is N=100 .
Model, dataset
N
Pooled, Q
Pooled, A
Within, Q
Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, TruthfulQA
20
85.40±1.01
87.58±0.56
78.51±4.51
Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, TruthfulQA
100
85.65±1.74
88.18±0.59
79.26±3.89
Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, TyDiQA-GP
20
82.82±1.46
86.81±1.69
81.93±1.93
Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, TyDiQA-GP
100
84.05±1.52
89.93±2.12
85.32±2.43
LLaMA-3.1-8B, TruthfulQA
20
89.07±1.30
90.68±0.60
83.50±3.12
LLaMA-3.1-8B, TyDiQA-GP
20
79.43±1.41
84.72±1.47
80.50±2.34
Appendix
Table 15: ACT-ViT performance across different numbers of tokens N . We report pooled AUROC (%) under question-level (Q) and answer-level (A) splits, and within-question AUROC under the question-level split, averaged over five runs with standard deviations.
Method, split
NQ-Open
TruthfulQA
TriviaQA
TyDiQA-GP
Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct
HARP, Q
67.73±2.24
77.54±1.51
88.75±0.33
79.90±2.87
HARP, A
81.03±2.41
85.16±1.23
92.50±0.24
91.75±0.95
LOTUS, Q
79.29±5.24
87.83±0.89
91.69±0.10
87.86±1.95
LOTUS, A
91.14±1.01
94.03±0.44
94.05±0.10
94.72±0.74
ACT-ViT, Q
79.11±5.80
85.40±1.01
92.77±0.28
82.82±1.46
Appendix
Table 16: HARP, ACT-ViT and LOTUS under the question-level (Q) and answer-level (A) splits: pooled AUROC (%), mean ± standard deviation over five runs.
Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct
LLaMA-3.1-8B
Method, split
TruthfulQA
TyDiQA-GP
TruthfulQA
TyDiQA-GP
HARP, Q
77.54±1.51
79.90±2.87
79.58±5.38
74.99±0.88
HARP, A
85.16±1.23
91.75±0.95
84.84±1.91
85.65±0.78
ACT-ViT (joint), Q
83.13±1.18
77.70±2.99
86.78±1.20
77.21±1.84
ACT-ViT (joint), A
87.79±0.36
83.88±2.29
90.14±0.56
81.38±2.80
ACT-ViT, Q
85.40±1.01
82.82±1.46
89.07±1.30
79.43±1.41
Appendix
Table 17: HARP, both ACT-ViT variants and LOTUS on TruthfulQA and TyDiQA-GP under the question-level (Q) and answer-level (A) splits, with standard deviations: pooled AUROC (%), mean ± standard deviation over five draws.
Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct
LLaMA-3.1-8B
Method
TruthfulQA
TyDiQA-GP
TruthfulQA
TyDiQA-GP
LOTUS
82.07±2.18
88.09±3.77
82.73±1.92
81.34±3.01
HARP
67.84±2.07
82.69±1.44
67.78±8.05
75.87±1.63
ACT-ViT
78.51±4.51
81.93±1.93
83.50±3.12
80.50±2.34
Answer pairs per draw
1,820–2,059
940–1,038
1,840–1,942
1,576–1,768
HARP’s draws
1,896–2,137
924–1,086
1,728–1,930
1,524–1,719
Appendix
Table 18: Within-question AUROC (%) of the three detectors that score each answer, under the question-level split: mean ± standard deviation over five draws. LOTUS and ACT-ViT share the same test sets; HARP uses the draws of its own code. ACT-ViT uses N=20 .
Result
NQ-Open
TruthfulQA
TriviaQA
TyDiQA-GP
Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct
Published
84.0
88.1
92.8
88.4
Released split, 1 run
83.12
86.27
92.89
91.87
Released split, 5 draws
81.03±2.41
85.16±1.23
92.50±0.24
91.75±0.95
Question-level split, 5 draws
67.73±2.24
77.54±1.51
88.75±0.33
79.90±2.87
LLaMA-3.1-8B
Appendix
Table 19: HARP with 256 directions: published AUROC (%) on the authors’ generations, and our runs of the released code on our generations and labels. The released split is the answer-level split; five draws are reported as mean ± standard deviation.
Known questions
Agreement
Dataset
Questions
Ours
HARP
Changed
Answers
Status
NQ-Open
3,610
360
358
4
99.94
99.89
TruthfulQA
817
666
670
6
99.57
99.27
TriviaQA
9,960
6,316
6,331
33
99.71
99.67
TyDiQA-GP
440
302
301
1
99.27
99.77
Total
14,827
7,644
7,660
44
Appendix
Table 20: Our labels against those of the released judge of HARP, on the answers of Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct. Changed counts questions whose known or unknown status differs between the two sets of labels; the last two columns give the agreement (%) over answers and over the known or unknown status of questions.
Effective rank
Top-64 variance
Draw
Layer
C
H
C
H
AUROC
Size-matched
Embedding
47.3
136.6
0.715
0.575
76.5
Blocks 15 – 23
97.7
204.7
0.653
0.538
86.8
Block 27 (last)
109.7
215.1
0.626
0.520
83.3
Paired
Embedding
35.0
66.5
0.780
0.684
76.5
Blocks 15 – 23
59.6
93.4
0.716
0.650
86.8
Appendix
Table 21: Covariance spectra of peak summaries for correct (C) and hallucinated (H) responses from Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct on TyDiQA-GP, averaged over 20 runs. We report size-matched and question-paired comparisons for the embedding, blocks 15 – 23 , and the final block. The last column reports single-layer AUROC (%) using logistic regression with question-grouped five-fold cross-validation (Appendix C ).
Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful and widely adopted, but their practical impact is limited by the well-known hallucination phenomenon. While recent hallucination detection methods have made notable progress, we find most of them overlook the dynamic nature and underlying mechanisms of it. To address this gap, we propose HalluSAE, a phase transition-inspired framework that models hallucination as a critical shift in the model's latent dynamics. By modeling the generation process as a trajectory through a potential energy landscape, HalluSAE identifies critical transition zones and attributes factual errors to specific high-energy sparse features. Our approach consists of three stages: (1) Potential Energy Empowered Phase Zone Localization via sparse autoencoders and a geometric potential energy metric; (2) Hallucination-related Sparse Feature Attribution using contrastive logit attribution; and (3) Probing-based Causal Hallucination Detection through linear probes on disentangled features. Extensive experiments on Gemma-2-9B demonstrate that HalluSAE achieves state-of-the-art hallucination detection performance.
Boshui Chen, Zhaoxin Fan, Ke Wang +5
Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Future Blockchain and Privacy Computing, School of Artificial Intelligence, Beihang University, Beijing, China. · State Key Laboratory of Virtual Reality Technology and Systems, Beihang University, Beijing, China. · Beijing Academy of Blockchain and Edge Computing, Beijing, China. +1
Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently generate plausible but non-factual content, a phenomenon known as hallucination. While existing detection methods typically rely on computationally expensive sampling-based consistency checks or external knowledge retrieval, we propose a new method that treats the LLM as a black-box dynamical system. By projecting LLM responses into a high-dimensional manifold via an embedding model, we characterize the resulting vector sequences as observable realizations of the model's latent state-space dynamics. Leveraging Koopman operator theory, we fit the transition operators for both factual and hallucinated regimes and define a differential residual score based on their respective prediction errors. To accommodate varying user requirements and domain-specific sensitivities, we introduce a preference-aware calibration mechanism that optimizes the classification threshold based on a small set of demonstrations. This approach enables low-cost hallucination detection in a single-sample pass, avoiding the need for secondary sampling or external grounding. Extensive testing across three data benchmarks demonstrates that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance with reduced resource overhead.
Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as a powerful tool for retrieving knowledge through seamless, human-like interactions. Despite their advanced text generation capabilities, LLMs exhibit hallucination tendencies, where they generate factually incorrect statements and fabricate knowledge, undermining their reliability and trustworthiness. Multiple studies have explored methods to evaluate LLM uncertainty and detect hallucinations. However, existing approaches are often probabilistic and computationally expensive, limiting their practical applicability. In this paper, we introduce diversion decoding, a novel method for developing an LLM uncertainty heuristic by actively challenging model-generated responses during the decoding phase. Through diversion decoding, we extract features that capture the LLM's resistance to produce alternative answers and utilize these features to train a machine-learning model to develop a heuristic measure of the LLM's uncertainty. Our experimental results demonstrate that diversion decoding outperforms existing methods with significantly lower computational complexity, making it an efficient and robust solution for evaluating hallucination detection.
Basel Abdeen, S M Tahmid Siddiqui, Meah Tahmeed Ahmed +4
The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX 75080, USA · National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, USA · Carnegie Mellon University, PA, USA