REVIEW 2 major objections 1 minor 300 references
A segment-wise rejection sampling method prevents hallucination snowballing in long-form LLM outputs.
Reviewed by Pith at T0; open to challenge. T0 means a machine referee read the full paper against a public rubric. the ladder, T0–T4 →
T0 review · grok-4.3
2026-06-28 10:01 UTC pith:CK4LHPZI
load-bearing objection SHARS introduces segment-level rejection sampling with adapted semantic uncertainty to curb hallucination snowballing, but the abstract supplies no numbers or modification details to evaluate the claim. the 2 major comments →
Building Reliable Long-Form Generation via Hallucination Rejection Sampling
The pith
A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.
Core claim
The authors claim that their Segment-wise Hallucination Rejection Sampling framework, instantiated with a modified semantic uncertainty detector, identifies hallucinated segments during generation, rejects them, and resamples until faithful segments are produced, thereby mitigating error propagation and enhancing factual consistency in long-form text while preserving informativeness.
What carries the argument
The SHARS framework that applies a hallucination detector to individual segments and resamples rejected ones to prevent accumulation of errors.
Load-bearing premise
Semantic uncertainty after the modifications serves as a reliable detector that rejects hallucinations without discarding valid content or letting errors through.
What would settle it
Observing no reduction in hallucination metrics or a drop in informativeness when applying the method to benchmark tasks compared to standard sampling.
If this is right
- Long-form generations have reduced hallucination rates on standard benchmarks.
- The method maintains or improves the amount of informative content produced.
- It operates without external resources like search engines.
- It is compatible with various hallucination detectors for future use.
Where Pith is reading between the lines
- This approach might apply to other error-prone sequential tasks such as multi-step reasoning.
- Further work could explore optimal segment lengths for the detector.
- Integration with training-time methods could compound the benefits.
Editorial analysis
A structured set of objections, weighed in public.
Referee Report
Summary. The manuscript proposes Segment-wise HAllucination Rejection Sampling (SHARS), an inference-time framework that detects hallucinated segments in long-form LLM outputs using a modified semantic uncertainty detector, rejects them, and resamples until faithful content is obtained. This is intended to prevent hallucination snowballing. The abstract claims that empirical evaluations on standardized hallucination benchmarks show substantial reductions in hallucinations while preserving or improving informativeness, without needing external resources.
Significance. If the central empirical claims hold and the detector modifications are validated, the work could provide a practical self-correction method for long-form generation reliability. The provision of code at the GitHub link supports reproducibility.
major comments (2)
- [Abstract] Abstract: the claim that 'vital modifications' to semantic uncertainty address its limitations is unsupported by any description of those modifications or validation that they raise uncertainty scores on consistently generated hallucinations (the core stress-test concern). This is load-bearing for the detector's reliability at segment level.
- [Evaluation] Evaluation section: the abstract asserts 'substantial' reductions but supplies no quantitative results, baselines, dataset details, or ablations; without these, the central claim that the method reduces hallucinations while preserving informativeness cannot be assessed.
minor comments (1)
- The method is presented as compatible with external resources for future extensions; a brief discussion of how this compatibility would work would improve clarity.
Simulated Author's Rebuttal
We thank the referee for the constructive feedback highlighting issues with the abstract and evaluation claims. We address each point below and will revise the manuscript to strengthen clarity and support for the central claims.
read point-by-point responses
-
Referee: [Abstract] Abstract: the claim that 'vital modifications' to semantic uncertainty address its limitations is unsupported by any description of those modifications or validation that they raise uncertainty scores on consistently generated hallucinations (the core stress-test concern). This is load-bearing for the detector's reliability at segment level.
Authors: We agree the abstract lacks detail on the modifications and their validation. The full manuscript (Section 3.2) describes the adaptations: computing semantic uncertainty at the segment level rather than token level, using a calibrated threshold based on segment length, and incorporating consistency checks across multiple samples. However, we did not include a dedicated stress-test validation showing elevated uncertainty scores specifically on consistently generated hallucinations. We will revise the abstract to briefly summarize the key modifications and add a targeted validation experiment or ablation in the revised manuscript. revision: yes
-
Referee: [Evaluation] Evaluation section: the abstract asserts 'substantial' reductions but supplies no quantitative results, baselines, dataset details, or ablations; without these, the central claim that the method reduces hallucinations while preserving informativeness cannot be assessed.
Authors: The evaluation section reports results on standardized hallucination benchmarks, but we acknowledge it does not sufficiently detail quantitative numbers, exact baselines, dataset splits, or ablations in a way that allows full assessment from the abstract alone. We will expand the evaluation section in the revision to include specific quantitative reductions, baseline comparisons, dataset descriptions, and ablation studies demonstrating the contribution of each component while preserving informativeness. revision: yes
Circularity Check
No circularity: inference-time procedure defined independently of inputs
full rationale
The paper proposes SHARS as an inference-time framework that applies any hallucination detector to identify and reject segments during generation, then resamples until faithful content is obtained. Semantic uncertainty is instantiated as the detector after unspecified modifications for long-form use, but the abstract and description contain no equations, fitted parameters, or self-citations that reduce any claim to its own inputs by construction. The central steps (segment detection, rejection, resampling) are procedurally specified and evaluated on external benchmarks, with no renaming of known results, uniqueness theorems imported from the authors, or predictions that are statistically forced by the fitting process. This matches the reader's assessment of minimal circularity risk.
Axiom & Free-Parameter Ledger
axioms (1)
- domain assumption Semantic uncertainty after modifications can serve as an effective hallucination detector for text segments
read the original abstract
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in open-ended text generation, yet they remain prone to hallucinating incorrect or unsupported content, which undermines their reliability. This issue is exacerbated in long-form generation due to hallucination snowballing, a phenomenon where early errors propagate and compound into subsequent outputs. To address this challenge, we propose a novel inference-time hallucination mitigation framework, named Segment-wise HAllucination Rejection Sampling (SHARS), which uses an arbitrary hallucination detector to identify and reject hallucinated segments during generation and resample until faithful content is produced. By retaining only confident information and building subsequent generations upon it, the framework mitigates hallucination accumulation and enhances factual consistency. To instantiate this framework, we adopt semantic uncertainty as the detector and introduce several vital modifications to address its limitations and better adapt it to long-form text. Our method enables models to self-correct hallucinations without requiring external resources such as web search or knowledge bases, while remaining compatible with them for future extensions. Empirical evaluations on standardized hallucination benchmarks demonstrate that our method substantially reduces hallucinations in long-form generation while preserving or even improving the informativeness of generation. Code is available at: https://github.com/TreeLLi/hallucination-rejection-sampling.
Figures
Reference graph
Works this paper leans on
-
[1]
The llama 3 herd of models , author=. arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.21783 , year=
work page internal anchor Pith review Pith/arXiv arXiv
-
[2]
2016 , eprint=
Neural Text Generation from Structured Data with Application to the Biography Domain , author=. 2016 , eprint=
2016
-
[3]
Advances in neural information processing systems , volume=
Retrieval-augmented generation for knowledge-intensive nlp tasks , author=. Advances in neural information processing systems , volume=
-
[4]
Proceedings of the 30th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining , pages=
Forag: Factuality-optimized retrieval augmented generation for web-enhanced long-form question answering , author=. Proceedings of the 30th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining , pages=
-
[5]
SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-world Github Issues? , author=
-
[6]
Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning , pages=
How language model hallucinations can snowball , author=. Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning , pages=
-
[7]
and Steiner, Benoit and Tucker, Paul and Vasudevan, Vijay and Warden, Pete and Wicke, Martin and Yu, Yuan and Zheng, Xiaoqiang , journal =
Abadi, Martin and Barham, Paul and Chen, Jianmin and Chen, Zhifeng and Davis, Andy and Dean, Jeffrey and Devin, Matthieu and Ghemawat, Sanjay and Irving, Geoffrey and Isard, Michael and Kudlur, Manjunath and Levenberg, Josh and Monga, Rajat and Moore, Sherry and Murray, Derek G. and Steiner, Benoit and Tucker, Paul and Vasudevan, Vijay and Warden, Pete an...
-
[8]
Interpreting
Abbasi-Asl, Reza and Yu, Bin , booktitle =. Interpreting
-
[9]
and Awad, Mohammed Ibrahim and Munim, Hossam E
AbdElKhalek, Youssef M. and Awad, Mohammed Ibrahim and Munim, Hossam E. Abd El and Maged, Shady A. , journal =. Trajectory-based fast ball detection and tracking for an autonomous industrial robot system , year =
-
[10]
Are you still on track!?
Abdelnabi, Sahar and Fay, Aideen and Cherubin, Giovanni and Salem, Ahmed and Fritz, Mario and Paverd, Andrew , journal =. Are you still on track!?
-
[11]
Abdelnabi, Sahar and Greshake, Kai and Mishra, Shailesh and Endres, Christoph and Holz, Thorsten and Fritz, Mario , booktitle =. Not
-
[12]
Large language models associate
Abid, Abubakar and Farooqi, Maheen and Zou, James , journal =. Large language models associate
-
[13]
Emergence of invariance and disentanglement in deep representations , year =
Achille, Alessandro and Soatto, Stefano , journal =. Emergence of invariance and disentanglement in deep representations , year =
-
[14]
Acikgoz, Emre Can and Qian, Cheng and Ji, Heng and Hakkani-Tür, Dilek and Tur, Gokhan , journal =. Self-
-
[15]
Differentially
Acs, Gergely and Melis, Luca and Castelluccia, Claude and De Cristofaro, Emiliano , journal =. Differentially
-
[16]
Adadi, Amina and Berrada, Mohammed , journal =. Peeking
-
[17]
Forecasting the
Adämmer, Philipp and Schüssler, Rainer A , journal =. Forecasting the
-
[18]
Addepalli, Sravanti and Varun, Yerram and Suggala, Arun and Shanmugam, Karthikeyan and Jain, Prateek , booktitle =. Does
-
[19]
Efficient and
Addepalli, Sravanti and Jain, Samyak and Radhakrishnan, Venkatesh Babu , booktitle =. Efficient and
-
[20]
, booktitle =
Addepalli, Sravanti and Jain, Samyak and Sriramanan, Gaurang and Venkatesh Babu, R. , booktitle =. Scaling
-
[21]
Debugging
Adebayo, Julius and Muelly, Michael and Liccardi, Ilaria and Kim, Been , booktitle =. Debugging
-
[22]
Post hoc
Adebayo, Julius and Muelly, Michael and Abelson, Harold and Kim, Been , journal =. Post hoc
-
[23]
and Nix, Tionney and Rybeck, Gabriel and Scheidegger, Carlos and Smith, Brandon and Venkatasubramanian, Suresh , journal =
Adler, Philip and Falk, Casey and Friedler, Sorelle A. and Nix, Tionney and Rybeck, Gabriel and Scheidegger, Carlos and Smith, Brandon and Venkatasubramanian, Suresh , journal =. Auditing black-box models for indirect influence , year =
-
[24]
Afchar, Darius and Guigue, Vincent and Hennequin, Romain , booktitle =. Towards
-
[25]
Cognitive data augmentation for adversarial defense via pixel masking , year =
Agarwal, Akshay and Vatsa, Mayank and Singh, Richa and Ratha, Nalini , journal =. Cognitive data augmentation for adversarial defense via pixel masking , year =
-
[26]
Agarwal, Rishabh and Melnick, Levi and Frosst, Nicholas and Zhang, Xuezhou and Lengerich, Ben and Caruana, Rich and Hinton, Geoffrey , journal =. Neural
-
[27]
Agarwal, Rishabh and Melnick, Levi and Frosst, Nicholas and Zhang, Xuezhou and Lengerich, Ben and Caruana, Rich and Hinton, Geoffrey E , booktitle =. Neural
-
[28]
Agarwal, Shivam and Zhang, Zimin and Yuan, Lifan and Han, Jiawei and Peng, Hao , journal =. The
-
[29]
Agashe, Saaket and Han, Jiuzhou and Gan, Shuyu and Yang, Jiachen and Li, Ang and Wang, Xin Eric , journal =. Agent
-
[30]
Aggarwal, Gunjan and Sinha, Abhishek and Kumari, Nupur and Singh, Mayank , journal =. On the
-
[31]
Analyzing the
Agrawal, Pulkit and Girshick, Ross and Malik, Jitendra , booktitle =. Analyzing the
-
[32]
and Goldfarb, Avi , journal =
Agrawal, Ajay and Gans, Joshua S. and Goldfarb, Avi , journal =. Artificial
-
[33]
Agrawal, Garima and Kumarage, Tharindu and Alghamdi, Zeyad and Liu, Huan , booktitle =. Can
-
[34]
Agrawal, Aishwarya and Batra, Dhruv and Parikh, Devi and Kembhavi, Aniruddha , journal =. Don't
-
[35]
Agrawal, Ayush and Suzgun, Mirac and Mackey, Lester and Kalai, Adam , booktitle =. Do
-
[36]
, booktitle =
Ahdritz, Gustaf and Qin, Tian and Vyas, Nikhil and Barak, Boaz and Edelman, Benjamin L. , booktitle =. Distinguishing the
-
[37]
and Arriaga, Rosa I
Aher, Gati V. and Arriaga, Rosa I. and Kalai, Adam Tauman , booktitle =. Using
-
[38]
Improving
Aichberger, Lukas and Schweighofer, Kajetan and Ielanskyi, Mykyta and Hochreiter, Sepp , booktitle =. Improving
-
[39]
Aichberger, Lukas and Paren, Alasdair and Li, Guohao and Torr, Philip and Gal, Yarin and Bibi, Adel , journal =
-
[40]
Rethinking
Aichberger, Lukas and Schweighofer, Kajetan and Hochreiter, Sepp , booktitle =. Rethinking
-
[41]
and Maini, Pratyush and Lipton, Zachary Chase and Kolter, J
Aithal, Sumukh K. and Maini, Pratyush and Lipton, Zachary Chase and Kolter, J. Zico , journal =. Understanding
-
[42]
Advances in
Akhtar, Naveed and Mian, Ajmal and Kardan, Navid and Shah, Mubarak , journal =. Advances in
-
[43]
Adversarial
Al-Maliki, Shawqi and Qayyum, Adnan and Ali, Hassan and Abdallah, Mohamed and Qadir, Junaid and Hoang, Dinh Thai and Niyato, Dusit and Al-Fuqaha, Ala , journal =. Adversarial
-
[44]
and Schaar, Mihaela van der , booktitle =
Alaa, Ahmed and Breugel, Boris Van and Saveliev, Evgeny S. and Schaar, Mihaela van der , booktitle =. How
-
[45]
and Neyshabur, Behnam and Zhai, Xiaohua , booktitle =
Alabdulmohsin, Ibrahim M. and Neyshabur, Behnam and Zhai, Xiaohua , booktitle =. Revisiting
-
[46]
Alayrac, Jean-Baptiste and Uesato, Jonathan and Huang, Po-Sen and Fawzi, Alhussein and Stanforth, Robert and Kohli, Pushmeet , booktitle =. Are
-
[47]
Flamingo: a
Alayrac, Jean-Baptiste and Donahue, Jeff and Luc, Pauline and Miech, Antoine and Barr, Iain and Hasson, Yana and Lenc, Karel and Mensch, Arthur and Millican, Katie and Reynolds, Malcolm and Ring, Roman and Rutherford, Eliza and Cabi, Serkan and Han, Tengda and Gong, Zhitao and Samangooei, Sina and Monteiro, Marianne and Menick, Jacob and Borgeaud, Sebasti...
-
[48]
Adversarial example detection for
Aldahdooh, Ahmed and Hamidouche, Wassim and Fezza, Sid Ahmed and Déforges, Olivier , journal =. Adversarial example detection for
-
[49]
News and
Aleti, Saketh and Bollerslev, Tim , journal =. News and
-
[50]
What is an object? , year =
Alexe, Bogdan and Deselaers, Thomas and Ferrari, Vittorio , booktitle =. What is an object? , year =
-
[51]
and Thabet, Ali and Bibi, Adel and Torr, Philip H
Alfarra, Motasem and Perez, Juan C. and Thabet, Ali and Bibi, Adel and Torr, Philip H. S. and Ghanem, Bernard , booktitle =. Combating
-
[52]
Alfarra, Motasem and Bibi, Adel and Torr, Philip H. S. and Ghanem, Bernard , booktitle =. Data dependent randomized smoothing , year =
-
[53]
Alfarra, Motasem and Bibi, Adel and Khan, Naeemullah and Torr, Philip H. S. and Ghanem, Bernard , booktitle =
-
[54]
Superintelligence
Alfonseca, Manuel and Cebrian, Manuel and Anta, Antonio Fernandez and Coviello, Lorenzo and Abeliuk, Andrés and Rahwan, Iyad , journal =. Superintelligence
-
[55]
Generalizability of
Alhamoud, Kumail and Hammoud, Hasan Abed Al Kader and Alfarra, Motasem and Ghanem, Bernard , journal =. Generalizability of
-
[56]
Entropy-
Ali, Riccardo and Caso, Francesco and Irwin, Christopher and Liò, Pietro , journal =. Entropy-
-
[57]
Allen-Zhu, Zeyuan and Li, Yuanzhi and Song, Zhao , booktitle =. A
-
[58]
Allen-Zhu, Zeyuan and Li, Yuanzhi , journal =. Feature
-
[59]
, journal =
Alom, Md Zahangir and Hasan, Mahmudul and Yakopcic, Chris and Taha, Tarek M. , journal =. Inception
-
[60]
Mind the
Alsallakh, Bilal and Kokhlikyan, Narine and Miglani, Vivek and Yuan, Jun and Reblitz-Richardson, Orion , journal =. Mind the
-
[61]
and Restificar, Angelo C
Altendorf, Eric E. and Restificar, Angelo C. and Dietterich, Thomas G. , booktitle =. Learning from sparse data by exploiting monotonicity constraints , year =
-
[62]
A causal framework for explaining the predictions of black-box sequence-to-sequence models , year =
Alvarez-Melis, David and Jaakkola, Tommi , booktitle =. A causal framework for explaining the predictions of black-box sequence-to-sequence models , year =
-
[63]
, booktitle =
Alvarez-Melis, David and Jaakkola, Tommi S. , booktitle =. On the
-
[64]
, booktitle =
Alzantot, Moustafa and Sharma, Yash and Chakraborty, Supriyo and Zhang, Huan and Hsieh, Cho-Jui and Srivastava, Mani B. , booktitle =
-
[65]
Generating
Alzantot, Moustafa and Sharma, Yash and Elgohary, Ahmed and Ho, Bo-Jhang and Srivastava, Mani and Chang, Kai-Wei , booktitle =. Generating
-
[66]
Understanding and
Amir, Dan and Weiss, Yair , journal =. Understanding and
-
[67]
Concrete
Amodei, Dario and Olah, Chris and Steinhardt, Jacob and Christiano, Paul and Schulman, John and Mané, Dan , journal =. Concrete
-
[68]
Amorim, J. P. and Abreu, P. H. and Reyes, M. and Santos, J. , booktitle =. Interpretability vs
-
[69]
An, Xiao and Sun, Jiaxing and Gui, Zihan and He, Wei , booktitle =
-
[70]
Modeling human decisions in coupled human and natural systems:
An, Li , journal =. Modeling human decisions in coupled human and natural systems:
-
[71]
Gradient-
Ancona, Marco and Ceolini, Enea and Öztireli, Cengiz and Gross, Markus , booktitle =. Gradient-
-
[72]
Towards better understanding of gradient-based attribution methods for
Ancona, Marco and Ceolini, Enea and Öztireli, Cengiz and Gross, Markus , journal =. Towards better understanding of gradient-based attribution methods for
-
[73]
Zico and Fredrikson, Matt and Gal, Yarin and Davies, Xander , journal =
Andriushchenko, Maksym and Souly, Alexandra and Dziemian, Mateusz and Duenas, Derek and Lin, Maxwell and Wang, Justin and Hendrycks, Dan and Zou, Andy and Kolter, J. Zico and Fredrikson, Matt and Gal, Yarin and Davies, Xander , journal =
-
[74]
Andriushchenko, Maksym and Flammarion, Nicolas , journal =. Does
-
[75]
Jailbreaking
Andriushchenko, Maksym and Croce, Francesco and Flammarion, Nicolas , booktitle =. Jailbreaking
-
[76]
Andriushchenko, Maksym and Croce, Francesco and Flammarion, Nicolas and Hein, Matthias , booktitle =. Square
-
[77]
Understanding and
Andriushchenko, Maksym and Flammarion, Nicolas , booktitle =. Understanding and
-
[78]
Ang (Ming), Gary , journal =
-
[79]
and Bates, Stephen , journal =
Angelopoulos, Anastasios N. and Bates, Stephen , journal =. A
-
[80]
, booktitle =
Angelucci, Alessandra and Bressloff, Paul C. , booktitle =. Contribution of feedforward, lateral and feedback connections to the classical receptive field center and extra-classical receptive field surround of primate
discussion (0)
Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.