Hallucination Detection in LLMs with Topological Divergence on Attention Graphs

摘要

Hallucinations remain a critical challenge for large language models (LLMs), particularly in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) settings where models may generate outputs unsupported by the provided context. To address this, we introduce TOHA, a TOpology-based HAllucination detector, which leverages a topological divergence metric to quantify the structural properties of graphs induced by attention matrices. Examining the topological divergence between prompt and response subgraphs in RAG settings reveals consistent patterns: higher divergence values in specific attention heads correlate with unfaithful outputs, independent of the dataset. Extensive experiments — including evaluations on question answering and summarization tasks — show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art or competitive results on several benchmarks while requiring minimal annotated data and computational resources. Our findings indicate that the topological structure of attention matrices provides an efficient and robust metric for assessing the correctness of LLM’s responses.