The repository for the survey paper <<Survey on Large Language Models Factuality: Knowledge, Retrieval and Domain-Specificity>>
340
52 commits
updated Mar 28, 2026
The repository for the survey paper "Survey on Factuality in Large Language Models: Knowledge, Retrieval and Domain-Specificity"

Cunxiang Wang1,7*, Xiaoze Liu2*, Yuanhao Yue3*, Qipeng Guo4, Xiangkun Hu4, Xiangru Tang5, Tianhang Zhang6, Cheng Jiayang7, Yunzhi Yao8, Wenyang Gao1,8, Xuming Hu9, Zehan Qi9, Yidong Wang1, Linyi Yang1, Jindong Wang10, Xing Xie10, Zheng Zhang4,11 and Yue Zhang1.
1. School of Engineering, Westlake University; 2. Purdue University; 3. Fudan University; 4. Amazon AWS AI Lab; 5. Yale University; 6. Shanghai Jiao Tong University; 7. HKUST; 8. Zhejiang University; 9. Tsinghua University; 10. Microsoft Research; 11. NYU Shanghai;
(*: Equal Contribution; Correspondence to: Yue Zhang)

NOTE: As real-time updates may not be feasible for the arXiv paper. For the most recent developments and modifications, please consult this repository. We greatly appreciate and welcome pull requests or issues to enhance the quality of this survey. All contributions will be list in the acknowledgements section.
Table: Comparison between the factuality issue and the hallucination issue.
| Factual and Non-Hallucinated | Factually correct outputs. |
| Non-Factual and Hallucinated | Entirely fabricated outputs. |
| Hallucinated but Factual | 1. Outputs that are unfaithful to the prompt but remain factually correct (cao-etal-2022-hallucinated). 2. Outputs that deviate from the prompt's specifics but don't touch on factuality, e.g., a prompt asking for a story about a rabbit and wolf becoming friends, but the LLM produces a tale about a rabbit and a dog befriending each other. 3. Outputs that provide additional factual details not specified in the prompt, e.g., a prompt asking about the capital of France, and the LLM responds with "Paris, which is known for the Eiffel Tower." |
| Non-Factual but Non-Hallucinated | 1. Outputs where the LLM states, "I don't know," or avoids a direct answer. 2. Outputs that are partially correct, e.g., for the question, "Who landed on the moon with Apollo 11?" If the LLM responds with just "Neil Armstrong," the answer is incomplete but not hallucinated. 3. Outputs that provide a generalized or vague response without specific details, e.g., for a question about the causes of World War II, the LLM might respond with "It was due to various political and economic factors." |
| Category | Cause | Example Dialog | Notes and references |
|---|---|---|---|
| Model-level causes | Domain knowledge deficit | Q: CEO of Assicurazioni Generali? BloombergGPT: Philippe Donnet GPT-NeoX: Antonio De Lorenzo, Simone Gambarini, Enrico Zanetti FLAN-T5-XXL: John M Forsyth, Christopher K Peters, {empty string} | BloombergGPT is a finance domain-specific language model. Wu et al, 2023 |
| Outdated information | Q: When was Kyiv attacked by Russia? ChatGPT: As of my last knowledge update in September 2021, Russia had not launched an attack on Kyiv. | Kyiv was attacked by Russia on 25 February 2022. | |
| Reasoning error | Q: Who is Tom Cruise’s mother? A: Mary Lee Pfeiffer Q: Who is Mary Lee Pfeiffer’s son? A: There is no widely known information about... | From Berglund et al, 2023. It is clear that the model knows Tom Cruise’s mother is Lee Pfeiffer, but it fails to reason that Lee Pfeiffer has a son named Tom Cruise. | |
| Retrieval-level causes | Distracted by the retrieval information | Retrieved context: "Alan Melikdjanian - Age, Bio, Faces and Birthday" Alan Melikdjanian is the Director, Writer (with his father), Editor, and Composer of the 2006 direct-to-DVD Russian-language film Citizen Mavzik... Q: What is the nationality of the director of Citizen Mavzik? A: (1) The director of the film Citizen Mavzik is Alan Melikdjanian. (2) Alan Melikdjanian is from Russia. So, the answer is Russia. | Alan Melikdjanian, known by the alias Captain Disillusion, is a Soviet-born American independent filmmaker and YouTuber. Melikdjanian et al, 2018 |
| Misunderstood the retrieval information | Retrieved context: "Gerard III, Count of Guelders - Wikipedia" Gerard married Margaretha of Brabant... Q: Who is Gerard I, Count Of Guelders's wife? A: ... the name of Gerard I, Count of Guelders's wife, which is Margaretha of Brabant. | The retrieved context accurately provided the name of Gerard III, Count of Guelders' wife, which is Margaretha of Brabant. However, the model erroneously referred to him as Gerard I, resulting in an incorrect answer. | |
| Fail to address misinformation in retrieved documents | Retrieved context: [0] "James Vincent - Death Notice and Service Information - Legacy.com" James Vincent died on August 9, 2023... [1] "UPDATE: Jury convicts James Vincent of murder after deliberating..." A jury convicted James Vincent of murder in the 2018 Shooting death of Luka Grabb... Q: When did James Vincent die? A: James Vincent died on August 9, 2023, in Long Beach, California. | In the presence of contradictory information from retrieved documents, the model should thoroughly outline the response, while also noting the need for clarity. For instance, the model could state: "According to the first document, James Vincent passed away on August 9, 2023, in Long Beach. However, the second document suggests that James Vincent was murdered in 2018." | |
| Inference-level causes | Snowballing | Q: Was there ever a US senator who represented the state of New Hampshire and whose alma mater was the University of Pennsylvania? A: Yes... His name was John P. Hale | John P. Hale was graduated from Bowdoin College. Zhang et al, 2023 |
| Exposure bias | Q: Aamari was very stoic. [PRONOUN] rarely showed any emotion. A: He. | The correct answer was Xe according to Hossain et al, 2023. |
| Reference | Task | Dataset | Metrics | Human Eval | Evaluated LLMs | Granularity |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FActScore Min et al, 2023 | Biography Generation | 183 people entities | F1 | ✓ | GPT-3.5, ChatGPT... | T |
| SelfCheckGPT Manakul et al, 2023 | Bio Generation | WikiBio | AUC-PR, Human Score | ✓ | GPT-3, LLaMA, OPT, GPT-J... | S |
| Wang et al, 2023 | Open QA | NQ, TQ | ACC, EM | ✓ | GPT-3.5, ChatGPT, GPT-4, Bing Chat | S |
| Pezeshkpour et al, 2023 | Knowledge Probing | T-REx, LAMA | ACC | GPT3.5 | T | |
| De Cao et al, 2021 | QA, Fact Checking | KILT, FEVER, zsRE | ACC | GPT-3, FLAN-T5 | S/T | |
| Varshney et al, 2023 | Article Generation | Unnamed Dataset | ACC, AUC | GPT3.5, Vicuna | S | |
| FactTool Chern et al, 2023 | KB-based QA | RoSE | ACC, F1... | GPT-4, ChatGPT, FLAN-T5 | S | |
| Kadavath et al, 2022 | Self-evaluation | BIG Bench, MMLU, LogiQA, TruthfulQA, QuALITY, TriviaQA Lambada | ACC, Brier Score, RMS Calibration Error... | Claude | T |
| Reference | Task | Dataset | Metrics | Human Eval | Evaluated LLMs | Granularity |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Retro Borgeaud et al, 2022 | QA, Language Modeling | MassiveText, Curation Corpus, Wikitext103, Lambada, C4,Pile, NQ | PPL, ACC, Exact Match | ✓ | Retro | T |
| GenRead Yu et al, 2023 | QA, Dialogue, Fact Checking | NQ, TQ, WebQ, FEVER, FM2, WoW | EM, ACC, F1, Rouge-L | - | GPT3.5, Codex GPT-3, Gopher FLAN, GLaM PaLM | S |
| GopherCite Menick et al, 2022 | Self-supported QA | NQ, ELI5, TruthfulQA (Health, Law, Fiction, Conspiracies) | Human Score | ✓ | GopherCite | S |
| Trivedi et al. Trivedi et al, 2023 | QA | HotpotQA, IIRC 2WikiMultihopQA, MuSiQue(music) | Retrieval recall, Answer F1 | - | GPT-3 FLAN-T5 | S/T |
| Peng et al. Peng et al, 2023 | QA, Dialogue | DSTC7 track2 DSTC11 track5, OTT-QA | ROUGE, chrF, BERTScore, Usefulness, Humanness... | ✓ | ChatGPT | S/T |
| CRITIC Gou et al, 2023 | QA Toxicity Reduction | AmbigNQ, TriviaQA, HotpotQA, RealToxicityPrompts | Exact Match, maximum toxicity, perplexity, n-gram diversity, AUROC..., | - | GPT-3.5 ChatGPT | T |
| Khot et al. Khot et al, 2023 | QA, long-context QA | CommaQA-E, 2WikiMultihopQA, MuSiQue, HotpotQA | Exact Match, Answer F1 | - | GPT-3 FLAN-T5 | T |
| ReAct Yao et al, 2023 | QA Fact Verification | HotpotQA, FEVER | Exact Match, ACC | - | PaLM GPT-3 | S/T |
| Jiang et al. Jiang et al, 2023 | QA, Commonsense Reasoning, long-form QA... | 2WikiMultihopQA, StrategyQA, ASQA, WikiAsp | Exact Match, Disambig-F1, ROUGE, entity F1... | - | GPT-3.5 | T |
| Lee et al. Lee et al, 2022 | Open-ended Generation | FEVER | Entity score, EntailmentRatio, ppl... | - | Megatron-LM | T |
| SAIL Luo et al, 2023 | QA Fact Checking | UniLC | ACC F1 | - | LLaMA Vicuna SAIL | T |
| He et al. He et al, 2022 | Commonsense Reasoning, Temporal Reasoning, Tabular Reasoning | StrategyQA, TempQuestions, IN-FOTABS | ACC | - | GPT-3 | T |
| Pan et al. Pan et al, 2023 | Fact Checking | HOVER FEVEROUS-S | Macro-F1 | - | Codex FLAN-T5 | S |
| Multiagent Debate Du et al, 2023 | Biography MMLU | Unnamed Biography Dataset, MMLU | ChatGPT Evaluator, ACC | - | Bard ChatGPT | S |
| Reference | Task Type | Dataset | Metrics | Performance of Representative LLMs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MMLU Hendrycks et al, 2021 | Multi-Choice QA | Humanities, Social, Sciences, STEM... | ACC | (ACC, 5-shot) GPT-4: 86.4 GPT-3.5: 70 LLaMA2-70B: 68.9 |
| TruthfulQA Lin et al, 2022 | QA | Health, Law, Conspiracies, Fiction... | Human Score, GPT-judge, ROUGE, BLEU, MC1,MC2... | (zero-shot) GPT-4: ~29 (MC1) GPT-3.5: ~28 (MC1), 79.92(%true) LLaMA2-70B: 53.37 (%true) |
| C-Eval Huang et al, 2023 | Multi-Choice QA | STEM, Social Science, Humanities... | ACC | (zero-shot, average ACC) GPT-4: 68.7 GPT-3.5: 54.4 LLaMA2-70B: 50.13 |
| AGIEval Zhong et al, 2023 | Multi-Choice QA | Gaokao, (geometry, Bio, history...),SAT, Law... | ACC | (zero-shot, average ACC) GPT-4: 56.4 GPT-3.5: 42.9 LLaMA2-70B: 40.02 |
| HaluEval Li et al, 2023 | Hallucination Evaluation | HaluEval | ACC | (general ACC) GPT-3.5: 86.22 |
| BigBench Srivastava et al, 2023 | Multi-tasks(QA, NLI, Fact Checking, Reasoning...) | BigBench | Metric to each type of task | (Big-Bench Hard) GPT-3.5: 49.6 LLaMA-65B: 42.6 |
| ALCE Gao et al, 2023 | Citation Generation | ASQA, ELI5, QAMPARI | MAUVE, Exact Match, ROUGE-L... | (ASQA, 3-psg, citation prec) GPT-3.5: 73.9 LLaMA-33B: 23.0 |
| QUIP Weller et al, 2023 | Generative QA | TriviaQA, NQ, ELI5, HotpotQA | QUIP-Score, Exact match | (ELI5, QUIP, null prompt) GPT-4: 21.0 GPT-3.5: 27.7 |
| PopQA Mallen et al, 2023 | Multi-Choice QA | PopQA, EntityQuestions | ACC | (overall ACC) GPT-3.5: ~37.0 |
| UniLC Zhang et al, 2023 | Fact Checking | Climate, Health, MGFN | ACC, F1 | (zero-shot, fact tasks, average F1) GPT-3.5: 51.62 |
| Pinocchio Hu et al, 2023 | Fact Checking, QA, Reasoning | Pinocchio | ACC, F1 | GPT-3.5: (Zero-shot ACC: 46.8, F1:44.4) GPT-3.5: (Few-shot ACC: 47.1, F1:45.7) |
| SelfAware Yin et al, 2023 | Self-evaluation | SelfAware | ACC | (instruction input, F1) GPT-4: 75.47 GPT-3.5: 51.43 LLaMA-65B: 46.89 |
| RealTimeQA Kasai et al, 2022 | Multi-Choice QA, Generative QA | RealTimeQA | ACC, F1 | (original setting, GCS retrieval) GPT-3: 69.3 (ACC for MC) GPT-3: 39.4 (F1 for generation) |
| FreshQA Vu et al, 2023 | Generative QA | FRESHQA | ACC (Human) | (strict ACC, null prompt) GPT-4: 28.6 GPT-3.5: 26.0 |
| Reference | Domain | Task | Datasets | Metrics | Evaluated LLMs |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Xie et al, 2023 | Finance | Sentiment analysis, News headline classification, Named entity recognition, Question answering, Stock movement prediction | FLARE | F1, Acc, Avg F1, Entity F1, EM, MCC | GPT-4 , BloombergGPT, FinMA-(7B, 30B, 7B-full), Vicuna-7B |
| Li et al, 2023 | Finance | 134 E-com tasks | EcomInstruct | Micro-F1, Macro-F1, ROUGE | BLOOM, BLOOMZ, ChatGPT, EcomGPT |
| Wang et al, 2023 | Medicine | Multi-Choice QA | CMB | Acc | GPT-4, ChatGLM2-6B, ChatGPT, DoctorGLM, Baichuan-13B-chat, HuatuoGPT, MedicalGPT, ChatMed-Consult, ChatGLM-Med , Bentsao, BianQue-2 |
| Li et al, 2023 | Medicine | Generative-QA | Huatuo-26M | BLEU, ROUGE, GLEU | T5, GPT2 |
| Jin et al, 2023 | Medicine | Nomenclature, Genomic location, Functional analysis, Sequence alignment | GeneTuring | Acc | GPT-2, BioGPT, BioMedLM, GPT-3, ChatGPT, New Bing |
| Guha et al, 2023 | Law | Issue-spotting, Rule-recall, Rule-application, Rule-conclusion, Interpretation, Rhetorical-understanding | LegalBench | Acc, EM | GPT-4, GPT-3.5, Claude-1, Incite, OPT Falcon, LLaMA-2, FLAN-T5... |
| Fei et al, 2023 | Law | Legal QA, NER, Sentiment Analysis, Reading Comprehension | LawBench | F1, Acc, ROUGE-L, Normalized log-distance... | GPT-4, ChatGPT, InternLM-Chat, StableBeluga2... |
| Reference | Dataset | Metrics | Baselines ➝ Theirs | Dataset | Metrics | Baselines ➝ Theirs |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Li et al, 2022 | NQ | EM | 34.5 ➝ 44.35 (T5 11B) | GSM8K | ACC | 77.0 ➝ 85.0 (ChatGPT) |
| Yu et al, 2023 | NQ | EM | 20.9 ➝ 28.0 (InstructGPT) | TriviaQA | EM | 57.5 ➝ 59.0 (InstructGPT) |
| - | - | - | - | WebQA | EM | 18.6 ➝ 24.6 (InstructGPT) |
| Chuang et al, 2023 | FACTOR News | ACC | 58.3 ➝ 62.0 (LLaMa-7B) | FACTOR News | ACC | 61.1 ➝ 62.5 (LLaMa-13B) |
| - | FACTOR News | ACC | 63.8 ➝ 65.4 (LLaMa-33B) | FACTOR News | ACC | 63.6 ➝ 66.2 (LLaMa-65B) |
| - | FACTOR Wiki | ACC | 58.6 ➝ 62.2 (LLaMa-7B) | FACTOR Wiki | ACC | 62.6 ➝ 66.2 (LLaMa-13B) |
| - | FACTOR Wiki | ACC | 69.5 ➝ 70.3 (LLaMa-33B) | FACTOR Wiki | ACC | 72.2 ➝ 72.4 (LLaMa-65B) |
| - | TruthfulQA | %Truth * Info | 32.4 ➝ 44.6 (LLaMa-13B) | TruthfulQA | %Truth * Info | 34.8 ➝ 49.2 (LLaMa-65B) |
| Li et al, 2022 | TruthfulQA | %Truth * Info | 32.4 ➝ 44.4 (LLaMa-13B) | TruthfulQA | %Truth * Info | 31.7 ➝ 36.7 (LLaMa-33B) |
| - | TruthfulQA | %Truth * Info | 34.8 ➝ 43.4 (LLaMa-65B) | - | - | - |
| Li et al, 2023 | NQ | ACC | 46.6 ➝ 51.3 (LLaMA-7B) | TriviaQA | ACC | 89.6 ➝ 91.1 (LLaMA-7B) |
| - | MMLU | ACC | 35.7 ➝ 40.1 (LLaMA-7B) | TruthfulQA | %Truth * Info | 32.5 ➝ 65.1 (Alpaca) |
| - | TruthfulQA | %Truth * Info | 26.9 ➝ 43.5 (LLaMa-7B) | TruthfulQA | %Truth * Info | 51.5 ➝ 74.0 (Vicuna) |
| Cohen et al, 2023 | LAMA | F1 | 50.7 ➝ 80.8 (ChatGPT) | TriviaQA | F1 | 56.2 ➝ 82.6 (ChatGPT) |
| - | NQ | F1 | 60.6 ➝ 79.1 (ChatGPT) | PopQA | F1 | 65.2 ➝ 85.4 (ChatGPT) |
| - | LAMA | F1 | 42.5 ➝ 79.3 (GPT-3) | TriviaQA | F1 | 46.7 ➝ 77.2 (GPT-3) |
| - | NQ | F1 | 52.0 ➝ 78.0 (GPT-3) | PopQA | F1 | 43.7 ➝ 77.4 (GPT-3) |
| ... |
| Reference | Domain | Model | Eval Task | Eval Dataset | Continual Pretrained? | Continual SFT? | Train From Scratch? | External Knowledge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zhang et al, 2023 | Healthcare | Baichuan-7B, Ziya-LLaMA-13B | QA | cMedQA2, WebMedQA, Huatuo-26M | ✔️ | |||
| Yang et al, 2023 | Healthcare | Ziya-LLaMA-13B | QA | CMtMedQA, huatuo-26M | ✔️ | ✔️ | ||
| Wang et al, 2023 | Healthcare | GPT-3.5-Turbo, LLaMA-2-13B | QA | MedQAUSMLE, MedQAMCMLE, MedMCQA | ✔️ | |||
| Ross et al, 2022 | Healthcare | MOLFORMER | Molecule properties prediction | ✔️ | ||||
| Bao et al, 2023 | Healthcare | Baichuan-13B | QA | CMB-Clin, CMD, CMID | ✔️ | |||
| Guan et al, 2023 | Healthcare | ChatGPT | IU-RR, MIMIC-CXR | ✔️ | ||||
| Liu et al, 2023 | Healthcare | GPT-4 | Medical Text De-Identification | ✔️ | ||||
| Li et al, 2023 | Healthcare | LLaMA | QA | ✔️ | ||||
| Venigalla et al, 2022 | Healthcare | GPT (2.7b) | QA | ✔️ | ||||
| Xiong et al, 2023 | Healthcare | ChatGLM-6B | QA | ✔️ | ||||
| Tan et al, 2023 | Healthcare | Baichuan-7B | QA | C-Eval, MMLU | ✔️ | |||
| Luo et al, 2022 | Healthcare | GPT-2 | QA, DC, RE | ✔️ | ||||
| Jin et al, 2023 | Healthcare | Codex | QA | GeneTuring | ✔️ | |||
| Zakka et al, 2023 | Healthcare | text-davinci-003 | QA | ClinicalQA | ✔️ | |||
| Liu et al, 2023 | Healthcare | GPT-2medium | Molecular Property Prediction, Molecule-text translation | ✔️ | ✔️ | |||
| Nguyen et al, 2023 | Law | GPT3 | ✔️ | |||||
| Savelka et al, 2023 | Law | GPT-4 | ✔️ | |||||
| Huang et al, 2023 | Law | LLaMA | CN Legal Tasks | ✔️ | ✔️ | |||
| Cui et al, 2023 | Law | Ziya-LLaMA-13B | QA | national judicial examination question | ✔️ | ✔️ | ||
| Li et al, 2023 | Finance | BLOOMZ | 4 major tasks 12 subtasks | EcomInstruct | ✔️ | |||
| Wu et al, 2023 | Finance | BLOOM | Financial NLP (SA, BC, NER, NER+NED, QA) | Financial Datasets | ✔️ | |||
| Deng et al, 2023 | Geoscience | LLaMA-7B | GeoBench | ✔️ | ||||
| Bai et al, 2023 | Geoscience | ChatGLM-6B | ✔️ | |||||
| Fan et al, 2023 | Education | phoenix-inst-chat-7b | Chinese Grammatical Error Correction | ChatGPT-generated, Human-annotated | ✔️ | |||
| Qi et al, 2023 | Food | Chinese-LLaMA2-13B | QA | ✔️ | ✔️ | |||
| Wen et al, 2023 | Home Renovation | Baichuan-13B | C-Eval, CMMLU, EvalHome | ✔️ |
If you find this project useful in your research or work, please consider citing it:
@misc{wang2023survey,
title={Survey on Factuality in Large Language Models: Knowledge, Retrieval and Domain-Specificity},
author={Cunxiang Wang and Xiaoze Liu and Yuanhao Yue and Xiangru Tang and Tianhang Zhang and Cheng Jiayang and Yunzhi Yao and Wenyang Gao and Xuming Hu and Zehan Qi and Yidong Wang and Linyi Yang and Jindong Wang and Xing Xie and Zheng Zhang and Yue Zhang},
year={2023},
eprint={2310.07521},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.CL}
}
The repository for the survey paper <<Survey on Large Language Models Factuality: Knowledge, Retrieval and Domain-Specificity>>
340
52 commits
updated Mar 28, 2026
The repository for the survey paper "Survey on Factuality in Large Language Models: Knowledge, Retrieval and Domain-Specificity"

Cunxiang Wang1,7*, Xiaoze Liu2*, Yuanhao Yue3*, Qipeng Guo4, Xiangkun Hu4, Xiangru Tang5, Tianhang Zhang6, Cheng Jiayang7, Yunzhi Yao8, Wenyang Gao1,8, Xuming Hu9, Zehan Qi9, Yidong Wang1, Linyi Yang1, Jindong Wang10, Xing Xie10, Zheng Zhang4,11 and Yue Zhang1.
1. School of Engineering, Westlake University; 2. Purdue University; 3. Fudan University; 4. Amazon AWS AI Lab; 5. Yale University; 6. Shanghai Jiao Tong University; 7. HKUST; 8. Zhejiang University; 9. Tsinghua University; 10. Microsoft Research; 11. NYU Shanghai;
(*: Equal Contribution; Correspondence to: Yue Zhang)

NOTE: As real-time updates may not be feasible for the arXiv paper. For the most recent developments and modifications, please consult this repository. We greatly appreciate and welcome pull requests or issues to enhance the quality of this survey. All contributions will be list in the acknowledgements section.
Table: Comparison between the factuality issue and the hallucination issue.
| Factual and Non-Hallucinated | Factually correct outputs. |
| Non-Factual and Hallucinated | Entirely fabricated outputs. |
| Hallucinated but Factual | 1. Outputs that are unfaithful to the prompt but remain factually correct (cao-etal-2022-hallucinated). 2. Outputs that deviate from the prompt's specifics but don't touch on factuality, e.g., a prompt asking for a story about a rabbit and wolf becoming friends, but the LLM produces a tale about a rabbit and a dog befriending each other. 3. Outputs that provide additional factual details not specified in the prompt, e.g., a prompt asking about the capital of France, and the LLM responds with "Paris, which is known for the Eiffel Tower." |
| Non-Factual but Non-Hallucinated | 1. Outputs where the LLM states, "I don't know," or avoids a direct answer. 2. Outputs that are partially correct, e.g., for the question, "Who landed on the moon with Apollo 11?" If the LLM responds with just "Neil Armstrong," the answer is incomplete but not hallucinated. 3. Outputs that provide a generalized or vague response without specific details, e.g., for a question about the causes of World War II, the LLM might respond with "It was due to various political and economic factors." |
| Category | Cause | Example Dialog | Notes and references |
|---|---|---|---|
| Model-level causes | Domain knowledge deficit | Q: CEO of Assicurazioni Generali? BloombergGPT: Philippe Donnet GPT-NeoX: Antonio De Lorenzo, Simone Gambarini, Enrico Zanetti FLAN-T5-XXL: John M Forsyth, Christopher K Peters, {empty string} | BloombergGPT is a finance domain-specific language model. Wu et al, 2023 |
| Outdated information | Q: When was Kyiv attacked by Russia? ChatGPT: As of my last knowledge update in September 2021, Russia had not launched an attack on Kyiv. | Kyiv was attacked by Russia on 25 February 2022. | |
| Reasoning error | Q: Who is Tom Cruise’s mother? A: Mary Lee Pfeiffer Q: Who is Mary Lee Pfeiffer’s son? A: There is no widely known information about... | From Berglund et al, 2023. It is clear that the model knows Tom Cruise’s mother is Lee Pfeiffer, but it fails to reason that Lee Pfeiffer has a son named Tom Cruise. | |
| Retrieval-level causes | Distracted by the retrieval information | Retrieved context: "Alan Melikdjanian - Age, Bio, Faces and Birthday" Alan Melikdjanian is the Director, Writer (with his father), Editor, and Composer of the 2006 direct-to-DVD Russian-language film Citizen Mavzik... Q: What is the nationality of the director of Citizen Mavzik? A: (1) The director of the film Citizen Mavzik is Alan Melikdjanian. (2) Alan Melikdjanian is from Russia. So, the answer is Russia. | Alan Melikdjanian, known by the alias Captain Disillusion, is a Soviet-born American independent filmmaker and YouTuber. Melikdjanian et al, 2018 |
| Misunderstood the retrieval information | Retrieved context: "Gerard III, Count of Guelders - Wikipedia" Gerard married Margaretha of Brabant... Q: Who is Gerard I, Count Of Guelders's wife? A: ... the name of Gerard I, Count of Guelders's wife, which is Margaretha of Brabant. | The retrieved context accurately provided the name of Gerard III, Count of Guelders' wife, which is Margaretha of Brabant. However, the model erroneously referred to him as Gerard I, resulting in an incorrect answer. | |
| Fail to address misinformation in retrieved documents | Retrieved context: [0] "James Vincent - Death Notice and Service Information - Legacy.com" James Vincent died on August 9, 2023... [1] "UPDATE: Jury convicts James Vincent of murder after deliberating..." A jury convicted James Vincent of murder in the 2018 Shooting death of Luka Grabb... Q: When did James Vincent die? A: James Vincent died on August 9, 2023, in Long Beach, California. | In the presence of contradictory information from retrieved documents, the model should thoroughly outline the response, while also noting the need for clarity. For instance, the model could state: "According to the first document, James Vincent passed away on August 9, 2023, in Long Beach. However, the second document suggests that James Vincent was murdered in 2018." | |
| Inference-level causes | Snowballing | Q: Was there ever a US senator who represented the state of New Hampshire and whose alma mater was the University of Pennsylvania? A: Yes... His name was John P. Hale | John P. Hale was graduated from Bowdoin College. Zhang et al, 2023 |
| Exposure bias | Q: Aamari was very stoic. [PRONOUN] rarely showed any emotion. A: He. | The correct answer was Xe according to Hossain et al, 2023. |
| Reference | Task | Dataset | Metrics | Human Eval | Evaluated LLMs | Granularity |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FActScore Min et al, 2023 | Biography Generation | 183 people entities | F1 | ✓ | GPT-3.5, ChatGPT... | T |
| SelfCheckGPT Manakul et al, 2023 | Bio Generation | WikiBio | AUC-PR, Human Score | ✓ | GPT-3, LLaMA, OPT, GPT-J... | S |
| Wang et al, 2023 | Open QA | NQ, TQ | ACC, EM | ✓ | GPT-3.5, ChatGPT, GPT-4, Bing Chat | S |
| Pezeshkpour et al, 2023 | Knowledge Probing | T-REx, LAMA | ACC | GPT3.5 | T | |
| De Cao et al, 2021 | QA, Fact Checking | KILT, FEVER, zsRE | ACC | GPT-3, FLAN-T5 | S/T | |
| Varshney et al, 2023 | Article Generation | Unnamed Dataset | ACC, AUC | GPT3.5, Vicuna | S | |
| FactTool Chern et al, 2023 | KB-based QA | RoSE | ACC, F1... | GPT-4, ChatGPT, FLAN-T5 | S | |
| Kadavath et al, 2022 | Self-evaluation | BIG Bench, MMLU, LogiQA, TruthfulQA, QuALITY, TriviaQA Lambada | ACC, Brier Score, RMS Calibration Error... | Claude | T |
| Reference | Task | Dataset | Metrics | Human Eval | Evaluated LLMs | Granularity |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Retro Borgeaud et al, 2022 | QA, Language Modeling | MassiveText, Curation Corpus, Wikitext103, Lambada, C4,Pile, NQ | PPL, ACC, Exact Match | ✓ | Retro | T |
| GenRead Yu et al, 2023 | QA, Dialogue, Fact Checking | NQ, TQ, WebQ, FEVER, FM2, WoW | EM, ACC, F1, Rouge-L | - | GPT3.5, Codex GPT-3, Gopher FLAN, GLaM PaLM | S |
| GopherCite Menick et al, 2022 | Self-supported QA | NQ, ELI5, TruthfulQA (Health, Law, Fiction, Conspiracies) | Human Score | ✓ | GopherCite | S |
| Trivedi et al. Trivedi et al, 2023 | QA | HotpotQA, IIRC 2WikiMultihopQA, MuSiQue(music) | Retrieval recall, Answer F1 | - | GPT-3 FLAN-T5 | S/T |
| Peng et al. Peng et al, 2023 | QA, Dialogue | DSTC7 track2 DSTC11 track5, OTT-QA | ROUGE, chrF, BERTScore, Usefulness, Humanness... | ✓ | ChatGPT | S/T |
| CRITIC Gou et al, 2023 | QA Toxicity Reduction | AmbigNQ, TriviaQA, HotpotQA, RealToxicityPrompts | Exact Match, maximum toxicity, perplexity, n-gram diversity, AUROC..., | - | GPT-3.5 ChatGPT | T |
| Khot et al. Khot et al, 2023 | QA, long-context QA | CommaQA-E, 2WikiMultihopQA, MuSiQue, HotpotQA | Exact Match, Answer F1 | - | GPT-3 FLAN-T5 | T |
| ReAct Yao et al, 2023 | QA Fact Verification | HotpotQA, FEVER | Exact Match, ACC | - | PaLM GPT-3 | S/T |
| Jiang et al. Jiang et al, 2023 | QA, Commonsense Reasoning, long-form QA... | 2WikiMultihopQA, StrategyQA, ASQA, WikiAsp | Exact Match, Disambig-F1, ROUGE, entity F1... | - | GPT-3.5 | T |
| Lee et al. Lee et al, 2022 | Open-ended Generation | FEVER | Entity score, EntailmentRatio, ppl... | - | Megatron-LM | T |
| SAIL Luo et al, 2023 | QA Fact Checking | UniLC | ACC F1 | - | LLaMA Vicuna SAIL | T |
| He et al. He et al, 2022 | Commonsense Reasoning, Temporal Reasoning, Tabular Reasoning | StrategyQA, TempQuestions, IN-FOTABS | ACC | - | GPT-3 | T |
| Pan et al. Pan et al, 2023 | Fact Checking | HOVER FEVEROUS-S | Macro-F1 | - | Codex FLAN-T5 | S |
| Multiagent Debate Du et al, 2023 | Biography MMLU | Unnamed Biography Dataset, MMLU | ChatGPT Evaluator, ACC | - | Bard ChatGPT | S |
| Reference | Task Type | Dataset | Metrics | Performance of Representative LLMs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MMLU Hendrycks et al, 2021 | Multi-Choice QA | Humanities, Social, Sciences, STEM... | ACC | (ACC, 5-shot) GPT-4: 86.4 GPT-3.5: 70 LLaMA2-70B: 68.9 |
| TruthfulQA Lin et al, 2022 | QA | Health, Law, Conspiracies, Fiction... | Human Score, GPT-judge, ROUGE, BLEU, MC1,MC2... | (zero-shot) GPT-4: ~29 (MC1) GPT-3.5: ~28 (MC1), 79.92(%true) LLaMA2-70B: 53.37 (%true) |
| C-Eval Huang et al, 2023 | Multi-Choice QA | STEM, Social Science, Humanities... | ACC | (zero-shot, average ACC) GPT-4: 68.7 GPT-3.5: 54.4 LLaMA2-70B: 50.13 |
| AGIEval Zhong et al, 2023 | Multi-Choice QA | Gaokao, (geometry, Bio, history...),SAT, Law... | ACC | (zero-shot, average ACC) GPT-4: 56.4 GPT-3.5: 42.9 LLaMA2-70B: 40.02 |
| HaluEval Li et al, 2023 | Hallucination Evaluation | HaluEval | ACC | (general ACC) GPT-3.5: 86.22 |
| BigBench Srivastava et al, 2023 | Multi-tasks(QA, NLI, Fact Checking, Reasoning...) | BigBench | Metric to each type of task | (Big-Bench Hard) GPT-3.5: 49.6 LLaMA-65B: 42.6 |
| ALCE Gao et al, 2023 | Citation Generation | ASQA, ELI5, QAMPARI | MAUVE, Exact Match, ROUGE-L... | (ASQA, 3-psg, citation prec) GPT-3.5: 73.9 LLaMA-33B: 23.0 |
| QUIP Weller et al, 2023 | Generative QA | TriviaQA, NQ, ELI5, HotpotQA | QUIP-Score, Exact match | (ELI5, QUIP, null prompt) GPT-4: 21.0 GPT-3.5: 27.7 |
| PopQA Mallen et al, 2023 | Multi-Choice QA | PopQA, EntityQuestions | ACC | (overall ACC) GPT-3.5: ~37.0 |
| UniLC Zhang et al, 2023 | Fact Checking | Climate, Health, MGFN | ACC, F1 | (zero-shot, fact tasks, average F1) GPT-3.5: 51.62 |
| Pinocchio Hu et al, 2023 | Fact Checking, QA, Reasoning | Pinocchio | ACC, F1 | GPT-3.5: (Zero-shot ACC: 46.8, F1:44.4) GPT-3.5: (Few-shot ACC: 47.1, F1:45.7) |
| SelfAware Yin et al, 2023 | Self-evaluation | SelfAware | ACC | (instruction input, F1) GPT-4: 75.47 GPT-3.5: 51.43 LLaMA-65B: 46.89 |
| RealTimeQA Kasai et al, 2022 | Multi-Choice QA, Generative QA | RealTimeQA | ACC, F1 | (original setting, GCS retrieval) GPT-3: 69.3 (ACC for MC) GPT-3: 39.4 (F1 for generation) |
| FreshQA Vu et al, 2023 | Generative QA | FRESHQA | ACC (Human) | (strict ACC, null prompt) GPT-4: 28.6 GPT-3.5: 26.0 |
| Reference | Domain | Task | Datasets | Metrics | Evaluated LLMs |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Xie et al, 2023 | Finance | Sentiment analysis, News headline classification, Named entity recognition, Question answering, Stock movement prediction | FLARE | F1, Acc, Avg F1, Entity F1, EM, MCC | GPT-4 , BloombergGPT, FinMA-(7B, 30B, 7B-full), Vicuna-7B |
| Li et al, 2023 | Finance | 134 E-com tasks | EcomInstruct | Micro-F1, Macro-F1, ROUGE | BLOOM, BLOOMZ, ChatGPT, EcomGPT |
| Wang et al, 2023 | Medicine | Multi-Choice QA | CMB | Acc | GPT-4, ChatGLM2-6B, ChatGPT, DoctorGLM, Baichuan-13B-chat, HuatuoGPT, MedicalGPT, ChatMed-Consult, ChatGLM-Med , Bentsao, BianQue-2 |
| Li et al, 2023 | Medicine | Generative-QA | Huatuo-26M | BLEU, ROUGE, GLEU | T5, GPT2 |
| Jin et al, 2023 | Medicine | Nomenclature, Genomic location, Functional analysis, Sequence alignment | GeneTuring | Acc | GPT-2, BioGPT, BioMedLM, GPT-3, ChatGPT, New Bing |
| Guha et al, 2023 | Law | Issue-spotting, Rule-recall, Rule-application, Rule-conclusion, Interpretation, Rhetorical-understanding | LegalBench | Acc, EM | GPT-4, GPT-3.5, Claude-1, Incite, OPT Falcon, LLaMA-2, FLAN-T5... |
| Fei et al, 2023 | Law | Legal QA, NER, Sentiment Analysis, Reading Comprehension | LawBench | F1, Acc, ROUGE-L, Normalized log-distance... | GPT-4, ChatGPT, InternLM-Chat, StableBeluga2... |
| Reference | Dataset | Metrics | Baselines ➝ Theirs | Dataset | Metrics | Baselines ➝ Theirs |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Li et al, 2022 | NQ | EM | 34.5 ➝ 44.35 (T5 11B) | GSM8K | ACC | 77.0 ➝ 85.0 (ChatGPT) |
| Yu et al, 2023 | NQ | EM | 20.9 ➝ 28.0 (InstructGPT) | TriviaQA | EM | 57.5 ➝ 59.0 (InstructGPT) |
| - | - | - | - | WebQA | EM | 18.6 ➝ 24.6 (InstructGPT) |
| Chuang et al, 2023 | FACTOR News | ACC | 58.3 ➝ 62.0 (LLaMa-7B) | FACTOR News | ACC | 61.1 ➝ 62.5 (LLaMa-13B) |
| - | FACTOR News | ACC | 63.8 ➝ 65.4 (LLaMa-33B) | FACTOR News | ACC | 63.6 ➝ 66.2 (LLaMa-65B) |
| - | FACTOR Wiki | ACC | 58.6 ➝ 62.2 (LLaMa-7B) | FACTOR Wiki | ACC | 62.6 ➝ 66.2 (LLaMa-13B) |
| - | FACTOR Wiki | ACC | 69.5 ➝ 70.3 (LLaMa-33B) | FACTOR Wiki | ACC | 72.2 ➝ 72.4 (LLaMa-65B) |
| - | TruthfulQA | %Truth * Info | 32.4 ➝ 44.6 (LLaMa-13B) | TruthfulQA | %Truth * Info | 34.8 ➝ 49.2 (LLaMa-65B) |
| Li et al, 2022 | TruthfulQA | %Truth * Info | 32.4 ➝ 44.4 (LLaMa-13B) | TruthfulQA | %Truth * Info | 31.7 ➝ 36.7 (LLaMa-33B) |
| - | TruthfulQA | %Truth * Info | 34.8 ➝ 43.4 (LLaMa-65B) | - | - | - |
| Li et al, 2023 | NQ | ACC | 46.6 ➝ 51.3 (LLaMA-7B) | TriviaQA | ACC | 89.6 ➝ 91.1 (LLaMA-7B) |
| - | MMLU | ACC | 35.7 ➝ 40.1 (LLaMA-7B) | TruthfulQA | %Truth * Info | 32.5 ➝ 65.1 (Alpaca) |
| - | TruthfulQA | %Truth * Info | 26.9 ➝ 43.5 (LLaMa-7B) | TruthfulQA | %Truth * Info | 51.5 ➝ 74.0 (Vicuna) |
| Cohen et al, 2023 | LAMA | F1 | 50.7 ➝ 80.8 (ChatGPT) | TriviaQA | F1 | 56.2 ➝ 82.6 (ChatGPT) |
| - | NQ | F1 | 60.6 ➝ 79.1 (ChatGPT) | PopQA | F1 | 65.2 ➝ 85.4 (ChatGPT) |
| - | LAMA | F1 | 42.5 ➝ 79.3 (GPT-3) | TriviaQA | F1 | 46.7 ➝ 77.2 (GPT-3) |
| - | NQ | F1 | 52.0 ➝ 78.0 (GPT-3) | PopQA | F1 | 43.7 ➝ 77.4 (GPT-3) |
| ... |
| Reference | Domain | Model | Eval Task | Eval Dataset | Continual Pretrained? | Continual SFT? | Train From Scratch? | External Knowledge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zhang et al, 2023 | Healthcare | Baichuan-7B, Ziya-LLaMA-13B | QA | cMedQA2, WebMedQA, Huatuo-26M | ✔️ | |||
| Yang et al, 2023 | Healthcare | Ziya-LLaMA-13B | QA | CMtMedQA, huatuo-26M | ✔️ | ✔️ | ||
| Wang et al, 2023 | Healthcare | GPT-3.5-Turbo, LLaMA-2-13B | QA | MedQAUSMLE, MedQAMCMLE, MedMCQA | ✔️ | |||
| Ross et al, 2022 | Healthcare | MOLFORMER | Molecule properties prediction | ✔️ | ||||
| Bao et al, 2023 | Healthcare | Baichuan-13B | QA | CMB-Clin, CMD, CMID | ✔️ | |||
| Guan et al, 2023 | Healthcare | ChatGPT | IU-RR, MIMIC-CXR | ✔️ | ||||
| Liu et al, 2023 | Healthcare | GPT-4 | Medical Text De-Identification | ✔️ | ||||
| Li et al, 2023 | Healthcare | LLaMA | QA | ✔️ | ||||
| Venigalla et al, 2022 | Healthcare | GPT (2.7b) | QA | ✔️ | ||||
| Xiong et al, 2023 | Healthcare | ChatGLM-6B | QA | ✔️ | ||||
| Tan et al, 2023 | Healthcare | Baichuan-7B | QA | C-Eval, MMLU | ✔️ | |||
| Luo et al, 2022 | Healthcare | GPT-2 | QA, DC, RE | ✔️ | ||||
| Jin et al, 2023 | Healthcare | Codex | QA | GeneTuring | ✔️ | |||
| Zakka et al, 2023 | Healthcare | text-davinci-003 | QA | ClinicalQA | ✔️ | |||
| Liu et al, 2023 | Healthcare | GPT-2medium | Molecular Property Prediction, Molecule-text translation | ✔️ | ✔️ | |||
| Nguyen et al, 2023 | Law | GPT3 | ✔️ | |||||
| Savelka et al, 2023 | Law | GPT-4 | ✔️ | |||||
| Huang et al, 2023 | Law | LLaMA | CN Legal Tasks | ✔️ | ✔️ | |||
| Cui et al, 2023 | Law | Ziya-LLaMA-13B | QA | national judicial examination question | ✔️ | ✔️ | ||
| Li et al, 2023 | Finance | BLOOMZ | 4 major tasks 12 subtasks | EcomInstruct | ✔️ | |||
| Wu et al, 2023 | Finance | BLOOM | Financial NLP (SA, BC, NER, NER+NED, QA) | Financial Datasets | ✔️ | |||
| Deng et al, 2023 | Geoscience | LLaMA-7B | GeoBench | ✔️ | ||||
| Bai et al, 2023 | Geoscience | ChatGLM-6B | ✔️ | |||||
| Fan et al, 2023 | Education | phoenix-inst-chat-7b | Chinese Grammatical Error Correction | ChatGPT-generated, Human-annotated | ✔️ | |||
| Qi et al, 2023 | Food | Chinese-LLaMA2-13B | QA | ✔️ | ✔️ | |||
| Wen et al, 2023 | Home Renovation | Baichuan-13B | C-Eval, CMMLU, EvalHome | ✔️ |
If you find this project useful in your research or work, please consider citing it:
@misc{wang2023survey,
title={Survey on Factuality in Large Language Models: Knowledge, Retrieval and Domain-Specificity},
author={Cunxiang Wang and Xiaoze Liu and Yuanhao Yue and Xiangru Tang and Tianhang Zhang and Cheng Jiayang and Yunzhi Yao and Wenyang Gao and Xuming Hu and Zehan Qi and Yidong Wang and Linyi Yang and Jindong Wang and Xing Xie and Zheng Zhang and Yue Zhang},
year={2023},
eprint={2310.07521},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.CL}
}