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by K0balt 529 days ago
Low entropy is expected here, since the model is seeking a “best” answer based on reward training.

But I see the same misconceptions as always around “hallucinations”. Incorrect output is just incorrect output. There is no difference in the function of the model, no malfunction. It is working exactly as it does for “correct “ answers. This is what makes the issue of incorrect output intractable.

Some optimisation can be achieved through introspection, but ultimately, an llm can be wrong for the same reason that a person can be wrong, incorrect conclusions, bad data, insufficient data, or faulty logic/modeling. If there was a way to be always right, we wouldn’t need LLMs or second opinions.

Agentic workflows and introspection/cot catch a lot, and flights of fancy are often not supported or replicated with modifications to context, because the fanciful answer isn’t reinforced in the training data.

But we need to get rid of the unfortunate term for wrong conclusions,“hallucination” . When we say a person is hallucinating, it implies an altered state of mind. We don’t say that bob is hallucinating when he thinks that the sky is blue because it reflects the ocean, we just know he’s wrong because he doesn’t know about or forgot about Raleigh scattering.

Using the term “hallucination” distracts from accurate thought and misleads people to draw erroneous conclusions.

1 comments

Author here: Wholeheartedly agree with your comment on hallucination. I initially set out to answer the question “Will entropy help identify hallucination?” And soon realised that it doesn’t, for the same reasons you mentioned above. So I pivoted to just writing about the entropy measure in the post. And this is also reflected by how I started with hallucination and then quickly veered away from it. I’ll be more careful in future posts & conversations. Thanks!
Nice post, really, and I think it will help some people to understand more about how LLMs work, especially helping fix the dogma about “LLMs just randomly select the next most likely word” which is kinda true but so many qualifiers and contextual details apply that the statement is more misleading than useful.

On undesired output, I would think it a great service to the field if we could come up with a better and earwormier word for “hallucinations” and somehow make it stick.

Right now we have half the literate world walking around thinking that LLMs are licking frogs, and it does nothing to help people understand how to think about model outputs or how to increase the utility of these fantastic culture / data mining tools in their own lives.