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#hallucinations#next-wordprediction#languagemodels

Why Pretrained Models Hallucinate

Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing

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  • Presented by Santosh Vempala, Georgia Institute of Technology

Advanced. Deep dive for people who know the field.

17K views3 weeks ago

AI and machine learningComputer scienceTransformers and LLMsComputation and complexityMath for machine learning

Santosh Vempala analyzes hallucination in language models from a mathematical perspective, showing how next-word prediction training induces hallucinations.

Santosh Vempala (Georgia Institute of Technology) simons.berkeley.edu/talks/santosh-vempala-georgia-institute-… Trustworthy AI: From Hallucinations to Reliable Autonomy We analyze hallucination in language models from a mathematical perspective and find that the statistical pressures of the next-word prediction training pipeline induce hallucinations under fairly general conditions even when trained on clean data. The core proof is a simple reduction from a natural classification task ("fact or hallucination") to a generation/prompt completion task. The talk is based on facts and on work with Adam T. Kalai (STOC 2025) and with Kalai, Ofer Nachum and Eddie Zhang (Nature 2026).

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