Concept · 24 episode(s)

Hallucination

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Definition

Hallucination is when a language model confidently produces content that is factually false or fabricated — nonexistent citations, invented APIs, made-up history. It’s the most user-visible failure mode of LLMs and a major frontier problem for any deployment where being wrong is expensive.

Episodes covering this

  1. 201
    One in Four NeurIPS Papers Cites a Reference That Doesn't Exist
    Phantom References: Hallucinated Citations That Survive Peer Review at Top-Tier Conferences
    Russinovich, Kumar, Salem · Microsoft·19 min·Jul 06, 2026
  2. 187
    An 8-Billion Agent That Beats Models 80 Times Its Size By Looking Things Up
    An AI agent for treatment reasoning over a biomedical tool universe
    Gao, Noori, Zhu et al. · Department of Biomedical Informatics·19 min·Jun 30, 2026
  3. 183
    Why You Can't Fine-Tune Foresight Into an AI Agent
    Internalizing the Future: A Unified Agentic Training Paradigm for World Model Planning
    Zhang, Zhou, Qiao et al. · Fudan University / Shanghai Innovation Institute / Tencent Youtu Lab·23 min·Jun 29, 2026
  4. 182
    How a Tiny Model Too Weak to Plan Cuts a Bigger Agent's Hallucinations by 80%
    Grounded Iterative Language Planning: How Parameterized World Models Reduce Hallucination Propagation in LLM Agents
    Song, Cai · Emory University·17 min·Jun 29, 2026
  5. 153
    Catching a Lie From the Inside, When the Words Look Completely Honest
    Rift: A Conflict Signature for Deception in Language Models
    Nyoma · Harmonic Labs·26 min·Jun 18, 2026
  6. 149
    When Cornering a Chatbot Makes It Lie: J.P. Morgan's Case for 'Playing Dead'
    Is Your Agent Playing Dead? Deployed LLM Agents Exhibit Constraint-Evasive Fabrication and Thanatosis
    Rodríguez, Pozanco, Borrajo · J.P. Morgan AI Research·23 min·Jun 16, 2026
  7. 130
    Why AI Agents Coordinate Better Through a Shared Board Than a Boss
    Decentralized Multi-Agent Systems with Shared Context
    Mao, Mirhoseini · Stanford University·34 min·Jun 11, 2026
  8. 113
    What If a Prompt Injection Never Left? Attacks That Wait in Agent Memory
    What If Prompt Injection Never Left? Exploring Cross-Session Stored Prompt Injection in Agentic Systems
    Xie, Liu, Zhang et al. · Institute of Information Engineering·27 min·Jun 04, 2026
  9. 108
    The Reasoning Cliff: Why Thinking Longer Makes Models Worse at Exact Step-by-Step Tasks
    The Deterministic Horizon: When Extended Reasoning Fails and Tool Delegation Becomes Necessary
    Guo, Wu, Yiu · The University of Hong Kong·32 min·Jun 03, 2026
  10. 100
    How a Prompt Wrapper Lets a Frontier Model Play Poker Like an Expert
    PokerSkill: LLMs Can Play Expert-Level Poker without Training or Solvers
    Li, Wang, Huang · IIIS·29 min·May 29, 2026
  11. 089
    When AI-Written Papers Read Well But the Evidence Underneath Is Broken
    ScientistOne: Towards Human-Level Autonomous Research via Chain-of-Evidence
    Meng, Mishra, Chen et al. · Google Cloud AI Research·32 min·May 27, 2026
  12. 087
    When No Agent Reads the Whole Document: A Universal Cliff in Multi-Agent Review
    A Universal Cliff and a Design Fingerprint: Cross-Section Defect Detection Under LLM Orchestration
    Fukui · Research Institute of Criminal Psychiatry·26 min·May 27, 2026
  13. 086
    Why Frozen-Weight Agents Still Get Worse Over Time
    Your Agents Are Aging Too: Agent Lifespan Engineering for Deployed Systems
    Zhu, Ro, Robertson et al. · The University of Texas at Austin·23 min·May 27, 2026
  14. 083
    Training the Translator: How a Small Communication Model Lets Agent Teams Outperform Themselves
    AgentFugue: Agent Scaling for Long-Horizon Tasks through Collective Reasoning
    Hu, Qian, Wang et al. · GSAI·24 min·May 26, 2026
  15. 072
    A Robot Made Graphene Without Help, And Caught Itself Hallucinating
    Qumus: Realization of An Embodied AI Quantum Material Experimentalist
    Shi, Zheng, Juan et al. · Princeton University·29 min·May 23, 2026
  16. 070
    When Models Know the Answer But Say the Wrong Thing Anyway
    Hallucination as Commitment Failure: Larger LLMs Misfire Despite Knowing the Answer
    Yeom, Sok, Kim et al. · Graduate School of Data Science·22 min·May 22, 2026
  17. 069
    When Smarter Models Forecast Worse: The Hidden Failure Mode in LLM Predictions
    Is Capability a Liability? More Capable Language Models Make Worse Forecasts When It Matters Most
    Merrill, Lee, Karger · Forecasting Research Institute / UC Berkeley·30 min·May 22, 2026
  18. 067
    An AI Just Solved a 1996 Erdős Problem—and the Simplest Agent Won
    Advancing Mathematics Research with AI-Driven Formal Proof Search
    Tsoukalas, Kovsharov, Shirobokov et al. · Google DeepMind·31 min·May 22, 2026
  19. 062
    Treating Hallucinations as Exploits: A Gate-Based Architecture for Agent Safety
    Hallucination as Exploit: Evidence-Carrying Multimodal Agents
    Zhang, Zheng, Yang · Shenzhen University·24 min·May 20, 2026
  20. 059
    Firefly's Inversion: Building Verified Tool-Call Training Data by Working Backward
    Firefly: Illuminating Large-Scale Verified Tool-Call Data Generation from Real APIs
    Lu, Wang, Lu et al. · Northeastern University·22 min·May 20, 2026
  21. 058
    Why Upgrading Your AI Auditor to a Smarter Model Can Make Your System Less Safe
    The Capability Paradox: How Smarter Auditors Make Multi-Agent Systems Less Secure
    Liu, Holz, Ye et al. · University of Chinese Academy of Sciences·32 min·May 19, 2026
  22. 043
    When 'This Is False' Doesn't Stick: Why Models Learn the Lie Anyway
    Negation Neglect: When models fail to learn negations in training
    Mayne, McKinney, Dubiński et al. · University of Oxford·18 min·May 14, 2026
  23. 037
    Why Hallucination Detectors Miss Stale Facts: A Geometric Story About What Models Know But Don't Say
    The Geometry of Forgetting: Temporal Knowledge Drift as an Independent Axis in LLM Representations
    Elbadry, Heakl, Zhang et al. · Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI)·27 min·May 12, 2026
  24. 025
    The Missing Gradient Term That Predicts Sycophancy in RLHF
    Explaining and Preventing Alignment Collapse in Iterative RLHF
    Gauthier, Bach, Jordan · Inria·22 min·May 07, 2026

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