Learning to Reason for Hallucination Span Detection
Authors: name: Hsuan Su; name: Ting-Yao Hu; name: Hema Swetha Koppula; name: Kundan Krishna; name: Hadi Pouransari; name: Cheng-Yu Hsieh; name: Cem Koc; name: Joseph Yitan Cheng; name: Oncel Tuzel; name: Raviteja Vemulapalli
Published: 2025-10-02 16:24:28

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) often generate hallucinations -- unsupported
content that undermines reliability. While most prior works frame hallucination
detection as a binary task, many real-world applications require identifying
hallucinated spans, which is a multi-step decision making process. This
naturally raises the question of whether explicit reasoning can help the
complex task of detecting hallucination spans. To answer this question, we
first evaluate pretrained models with and without Chain-of-Thought (CoT)
reasoning, and show that CoT reasoning has the potential to generate at least
one correct answer when sampled multiple times. Motivated by this, we propose
RL4HS, a reinforcement learning framework that incentivizes reasoning with a
span-level reward function. RL4HS builds on Group Relative Policy Optimization
and introduces Class-Aware Policy Optimization to mitigate reward imbalance
issue. Experiments on the RAGTruth benchmark (summarization, question
answering, data-to-text) show that RL4HS surpasses pretrained reasoning models
and supervised fine-tuning, demonstrating the necessity of reinforcement
learning with span-level rewards for detecting hallucination spans.