From Architecture to Output: Testing the Structural Origins of Hallucination and the Amplifying Role of Data

원문 초록

Surveys of hallucination classify errors by how an output relates to its source, and often explain them by the model's structure: attention retrieves by association, the maximum-likelihood objective has no term for truth, and left-to-right decoding commits to early tokens. Data, on this account, makes these failures worse rather than causing them. The account is usually argued rather than tested. We test it with interventions that need only sampling access. Study 1 holds pretraining data, tokenizer and scale fixed and swaps attention for a state-space mixer, using five Pythia/Mamba pairs from 130M to 2.8B parameters and four further attention models, on 111 facts presented with a planted false or a planted true statement. Swapping the mixer leaves free-recall failure unchanged (both 2.8B models answer 3 of 200 SimpleQA questions), but it changes what happens to a defect in the input. From 410M upwards, every attention model repeats the planted falsehood more often than its matched state-space model (2.8B: 650 vs. 566 of 666 items, p = 2.5e-20), also on facts both models know, while the state-space models can still read planted facts they did not know. Study 2 replaces the first wrong fact in 111 erroneous answers from three instruction-tuned models. The correct fact cuts the share of answers with a downstream error from 92.5% to 48.1%, but a different wrong fact works as well (p = 0.38), and the models give the right answer in isolation on only 2 of 111 items. The structural account survives in a narrower form. The mixing component decides whether a defect in the context becomes an output error, commitment decides how an error spreads, and on long-tail questions the first error comes from missing knowledge, not from a suppressed truth.