Detecting Hallucinations in Haystack

Large language models (LLMs) are valuable tools but can often generate unreliable outputs, particularly when they lack information about a topic, leading to a phenomenon known as "hallucination." This issue poses significant challenges for their application in industries where accurate information is crucial. To address this, the team behind Haystack has developed a hallucination detector for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems, which evaluates how closely an LLM's output matches the information in a curated database. This detector assigns a support score to model responses, categorizing them into "full support," "partial support," "no support," or "contradiction," based on their similarity to source documents. This innovation aims to enhance the reliability of LLM-based systems, especially in sensitive sectors like law and finance, by allowing developers to manage hallucinations effectively and decide how to present model outputs to users. While this detector is a significant step towards making LLMs more production-ready, ongoing research and development are necessary to improve their reliability further.