Zero-source LLM Hallucination Detection with Human-like Criteria Probing

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 11 Jun 2026] Zero-source LLM Hallucination Detection with Human-like Criteria Probing Jiahao Yang, Shuhai Zhang, Hailong Kang, Feng Liu, Qi Chen, Mingkui Tan Large language models (LLMs) often hallucinate by generating factually incorrect or unfaithful content, posing significant risks to their safe use. Detecting such hallucinations is particularly challenging under the zero-source constraint, where no model internals or external references are available, and detection must rely solely on the textual query-answer pair. In this paper, we propose Human-like Criteria Probing for Hallucination Detection (HCPD), a paradigm that emulates the multi-faceted reasoning of human evaluators. Its core is a Human-like Criteria Probing (HCP) mechanism, in which a LLM agent adaptively decomposes its judgment into a weighted set of interpretable criteria and aggregates criterion-specific scores into a final truthfulness measure. To achieve this adaptive capability, we introduce a reward-based alignment scheme using only weak supervision from semantic consistency. At inference, we employ a multi-sampling aggregation strategy to ensure robust decisions while preserving full interpretability. We further provide theoretical analysis supporting the reliability of our approach. Extensive experiments show that HCPD consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, offering an effective and explainable solution for zero-source hallucination detection. Code is available at this https URL. Comments: Accepted at ICML 2026 Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL); Machine Learning (cs.LG) Cite as: arXiv:2606.12900 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2606.12900v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.12900 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Jiahao Yang [view email] [v1] Thu, 11 Jun 2026 04:58:05 UTC (4,514 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-06 Change to browse by: cs cs.CL cs.LG References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)