Hallucination Is a Retrieval Problem: Diagnosing Structural Confabulation in LLMs and a Path Forward via Grounded Belief Representations
Keywords:
Hallucination Mitigation, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, Knowledge Graph, Integration, Epistemic State Modeling, Transformer InterpretabilityAbstract
Hallucination in large language models (LLMs), the confident generation of factually incorrect or unsupported content, remains one of the most consequential unsolved problems in the field. Despite an enormous volume of empirical work, the community lacks a mechanistic consensus on why models hallucinate even when ground-truth information resides in training corpora. This article argues that hallucination is fundamentally a retrieval failure, not a knowledge failure: the parametric weights encode sufficient information, but the inference-time process of locating and conditioning on that information is unreliable. This framing redirects blame from the knowledge store toward the access mechanism and suggests that retrieval-augmented approaches are not merely useful patches but are architecturally necessary. Four structural limits of the dominant decoder-only transformer paradigm are diagnosed: superposition-induced interference, attention dilution in long contexts, RLHF overconfidence calibration, and benchmark saturation that together explain why scaling alone cannot resolve confabulation. Three concrete research directions are then proposed: (1) Belief-Grounded Decoding, which separates knowledge retrieval from language generation via an explicit epistemic state; (2) Structured Knowledge Integration for RAG, replacing flat retrieved text with relational subgraphs; and (3) Domain-Divergent Hallucination Benchmarks that test generalization across knowledge-distribution shift. Minimal proof-of-concept experiments executable within 12–18 months are outlined, and the critical failure modes of the proposed approaches are identified.
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