HalluCounter: Reference-free LLM Hallucination Detection in the Wild!

Response consistency-based, reference-free hallucination detection (RFHD) methods do not depend on internal model states, such as generation probabilities or gradients, which Grey-box models typically rely on but are inaccessible in closed-source LLMs. However, their inability to capture query-response alignment patterns often results in lower detection accuracy. Additionally, the lack of large-scale benchmark datasets spanning diverse domains remains a challenge, as most existing datasets are limited in size and scope. To this end, we propose HalluCounter, a novel reference-free hallucination detection method that utilizes both response-response and query-response consistency and alignment patterns. This enables the training of a classifier that detects hallucinations and provides a confidence score and an optimal response for user queries. Furthermore, we introduce HalluCounterEval, a benchmark dataset comprising both synthetically generated and human-curated samples across multiple domains. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by a significant margin, achieving over 90\% average confidence in hallucination detection across datasets.

@article{urlana2025_2503.04615,
  title={ HalluCounter: Reference-free LLM Hallucination Detection in the Wild! },
  author={ Ashok Urlana and Gopichand Kanumolu and Charaka Vinayak Kumar and Bala Mallikarjunarao Garlapati and Rahul Mishra },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.04615},
  year={ 2025 }
}