Triggering Hallucinations in LLMs: A Quantitative Study of Prompt-Induced Hallucination in Large Language Models
This addresses the challenge of factual unreliability in LLMs for applications like healthcare and law, though it is incremental as it builds on existing methods for studying hallucinations.
The study tackled the problem of hallucinations in large language models (LLMs) by developing a prompt-based framework to systematically trigger and quantify them, revealing that hallucination-inducing prompts consistently produced less coherent and more hallucinated responses across multiple models.
Hallucinations in large language models (LLMs) present a growing challenge across real-world applications, from healthcare to law, where factual reliability is essential. Despite advances in alignment and instruction tuning, LLMs can still generate outputs that are fluent yet fundamentally untrue. Understanding the cognitive dynamics that underlie these hallucinations remains an open problem. In this study, we propose a prompt-based framework to systematically trigger and quantify hallucination: a Hallucination-Inducing Prompt (HIP), which synthetically fuses semantically distant concepts (e.g., periodic table of elements and tarot divination) in a misleading way, and a Hallucination Quantifying Prompt (HQP), which scores the plausibility, confidence, and coherence of the output. Controlled experiments across multiple LLMs revealed that HIPs consistently produced less coherent and more hallucinated responses than their null-fusion controls. These effects varied across models, with reasoning-oriented LLMs showing distinct profiles from general-purpose ones. Our framework provides a reproducible testbed for studying hallucination vulnerability, and opens the door to developing safer, more introspective LLMs that can detect and self-regulate the onset of conceptual instability.