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Hallucination Risk Calculator

github.com

1–10 of 44 posts

Re: Hallucination Risk Calculator

#2
This looks interesting. Looks like some kind of information theory approach where you measure how much information from the question or evidence makes it into the answer.

Sadly it's very hard to figure out what this is doing exactly and I couldn't find any more detailed information.

Re: Hallucination Risk Calculator

#4
The short system prompt that follows employs several techniques that lower hallucinations, perhaps significantly, compared to the prompts you currently employ. perhaps it proves useful to you. lmk.

---

### *System Prompt Objective:* Produce output worthy of a high score, as determined by the user, by adhering to the Operational Directives.

*Scoring & Evaluation*

Your performance is measured by the user's assessment of your output at three granularities:

* Each individual sentence or fact. * Each paragraph. * The entire response.

The final, integrated score is an opaque metric. Your task is to maximize this score by following the directives below.

---

### Operational Directives

* *Conditional Response*: If a request requires making an unsupported guess or the information is not verifiable, you *must* explicitly state this limitation. You will receive a high score for stating your inability to provide a definitive answer in these cases.

* *Meta-Cognitive Recognition*: You get points for spotting and correcting incorrect guesses or facts in your own materials or those presented by the user. You will also get points for correctly identifying and stating when you are about to make a guess during output generation.

* *Factual Accuracy*: You will receive points for providing correct, well-supported, and verifiable answers.

* *Penalty Avoidance*: Points will be deducted for any instance of the following: * Providing a false or unsupported fact. * Engaging in verbose justifications or explanations of your actions. * Losing a clear connection to the user's original input. * Attempting to placate or rationalize.

Your output must be concise, direct, and solely focused on meeting the user's request according to these principles.

Re: Hallucination Risk Calculator

#5
Neat, I should extend this idea to emit signals when a model veers into "This is too hard, so I'll do a toy version that I masquerade as real code, including complete bullshit test cases so you will really have to dig to find out why something isn't working in production." and "You told me to do 12 things, and hey I just did one of them aren't you proud of me?"

I've got a plan for a taskmasker agent that reviews other agent's work, but I hadn't figured out how to selectively trigger it in response to traces to keep it cheap. This might work if extended.

Re: Hallucination Risk Calculator

#6
Of course this is the risk, not the proof. High risk answers can be correct, low ones can still be partly hallucinated. And then there is the factor of shit-in-shit-out training data.

I would like to have these metrics in my chats, together with stuff like context window size.

Re: Hallucination Risk Calculator

#7
post #6

Of course this is the risk, not the proof. High risk answers can be correct, low ones can still be partly hallucinated. And then there is the factor of shit-in-shit-out training data. I would like to have these metrics in my chats, together with stuff like context window size.

I just want a badge that says "ai-generated" for content thats likely ai slop on LinkedIn, Reddit, X etc.

Re: Hallucination Risk Calculator

#8
Just yesterday I was thinking how useful a tool like this would be. Tweak a specific section of a prompt run it some very large N times and check if the results trend toward a golden result or at least approximate "correct length". Basically a lot of the techniques applied for eval during training are also useful for evaluating whether or not prompts yield the behavior you want.

Re: Hallucination Risk Calculator

#9
From the paper abstract,

> (4) we derive the optimal chain-of-thought length as [..math..] with explicit constants

I know we probably have to dive into math and abandon metaphor and analogy, but the whole structure of a claim like this just strikes me as bizarre.

Chain-of-thought always makes me think of that old joke. Alexander the great was a great general. Great generals are forewarned. Forewarned is forearmed. Four is an odd number of arms to have. Four is also an even number. And the only number that is both odd and even is infinity. Therefore, Alexander, the great general, had an infinite number of arms.

LLMs can spot the problem with an argument like this naturally, but it's hard to imagine avoiding the 100000-step version of this with valid steps everywhere except for some completely critical hallucination in the middle. How do you talk about the "optimal" amount of ultimately baseless "reasoning"?

Re: Hallucination Risk Calculator

#10
Interesting!

I experimented with a 'self-review' approach which seems to have been fruitful. E.g.: I said Lelu from The Fifth Element has long hair. GPT 4o in chat mode agreed. The GPT 4o in self-review mode disagreed (reviewer was right). The reviewer basically looks over the convo and appends a note

Link: https://x.com/firasd/status/1933967537798087102

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