The prevalent use of large language models (LLMs) in various domains has
drawn attention to the issue of "hallucination," which refers to instances
where LLMs generate factually inaccurate or ungrounded information. Existing
techniques for hallucination detection in language assistants rely on intricate
fuzzy, specific free-language-based chain of thought (CoT) techniques or
parameter-based methods that suffer from interpretability issues. Additionally,
the methods that identify hallucinations post-generation could not prevent
their occurrence and suffer from inconsistent performance due to the influence
of the instruction format and model style. In this paper, we introduce a novel
pre-detection self-evaluation technique, referred to as {\method}, which
focuses on evaluating the model's familiarity with the concepts present in the
input instruction and withholding the generation of response in case of
unfamiliar concepts. This approach emulates the human ability to refrain from
responding to unfamiliar topics, thus reducing hallucinations. We validate
{\method} across four different large language models, demonstrating
consistently superior performance compared to existing techniques. Our findings
propose a significant shift towards preemptive strategies for hallucination
mitigation in LLM assistants, promising improvements in reliability,
applicability, and interpretability.

通过引入一种名为【自我检测】的新技术，本研究提出了一种预防性策略来减少大型语言模型中的 “幻觉” 现象，实验证明该技术在幻觉检测方面表现优异，对于提高语言助手的可靠性、适用性和解释性具有重要意义。