{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/evaluating-llms-at-detecting-errors-in-llm","title":"Evaluating LLMs at Detecting Errors in LLM Responses","arxiv_id":"2404.03602","date":"2024-04-04","proceeding":null,"authors":["Ryo Kamoi","Sarkar Snigdha Sarathi Das","Renze Lou","Jihyun Janice Ahn","Yilun Zhao","Xiaoxin Lu","Nan Zhang","Yusen Zhang","Ranran Haoran Zhang","Sujeeth Reddy Vummanthala","Salika Dave","Shaobo Qin","Arman Cohan","Wenpeng Yin","Rui Zhang"],"abstract":"With Large Language Models (LLMs) being widely used across various tasks, detecting errors in their responses is increasingly crucial. However, little research has been conducted on error detection of LLM responses. Collecting error annotations on LLM responses is challenging due to the subjective nature of many NLP tasks, and thus previous research focuses on tasks of little practical value (e.g., word sorting) or limited error types (e.g., faithfulness in summarization). This work introduces ReaLMistake, the first error detection benchmark consisting of objective, realistic, and diverse errors made by LLMs. ReaLMistake contains three challenging and meaningful tasks that introduce objectively assessable errors in four categories (reasoning correctness, instruction-following, context-faithfulness, and parameterized knowledge), eliciting naturally observed and diverse errors in responses of GPT-4 and Llama 2 70B annotated by experts. We use ReaLMistake to evaluate error detectors based on 12 LLMs. Our findings show: 1) Top LLMs like GPT-4 and Claude 3 detect errors made by LLMs at very low recall, and all LLM-based error detectors perform much worse than humans. 2) Explanations by LLM-based error detectors lack reliability. 3) LLMs-based error detection is sensitive to small changes in prompts but remains challenging to improve. 4) Popular approaches to improving LLMs, including self-consistency and majority vote, do not improve the error detection performance. Our benchmark and code are provided at https://github.com/psunlpgroup/ReaLMistake.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.03602v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.03602v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"evaluating-llms-at-detecting-errors-in-llm","repo_url":"https://github.com/psunlpgroup/realmistake","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"instruction-following","task_name":"Instruction Following"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"absolute-position-encodings","method_name":"Absolute Position Encodings"},{"method_slug":"adam","method_name":"Adam"},{"method_slug":"attention","method_name":"Attention"},{"method_slug":"bpe","method_name":"BPE"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"dropout","method_name":"Dropout"},{"method_slug":"gpt-4","method_name":"GPT-4"},{"method_slug":"llama","method_name":"LLaMA"},{"method_slug":"label-smoothing","method_name":"Label Smoothing"},{"method_slug":"layer-normalization","method_name":"Layer Normalization"},{"method_slug":"linear-layer","method_name":"Linear Layer"},{"method_slug":"multi-head-attention","method_name":"Multi-Head Attention"},{"method_slug":"position-wise-feed-forward-layer","method_name":"Position-Wise Feed-Forward Layer"},{"method_slug":"residual-connection","method_name":"Residual Connection"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"},{"method_slug":"transformer","method_name":"Transformer"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2404.03602","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2404.03602"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/psunlpgroup/realmistake","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran_draft_wrong":2,"unverified":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":3,"ran":2,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":3,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"e4a264f7165eeb7f","entry":"get_average_of_list_of_dict","repo":"psunlpgroup/realmistake","repo_kind":"official","path":"src/error_detection_analysis/calculate_performance.py","file_url":"https://github.com/psunlpgroup/realmistake/blob/HEAD/src/error_detection_analysis/calculate_performance.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_draft_wrong","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"OUTPUT_MISDECLARED","metamorphic_tier":"deterministic","behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"NOASSERTION","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"e4a264f7165eeb7f"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"90f0d92f0b04caa5","entry":"get_performance","repo":"psunlpgroup/realmistake","repo_kind":"official","path":"src/error_detection_analysis/calculate_performance.py","file_url":"https://github.com/psunlpgroup/realmistake/blob/HEAD/src/error_detection_analysis/calculate_performance.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_draft_wrong","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"OUTPUT_MISDECLARED","metamorphic_tier":"deterministic","behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"NOASSERTION","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"90f0d92f0b04caa5"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"4f2d110dd4632edc","entry":"get_average_performance","repo":"psunlpgroup/realmistake","repo_kind":"official","path":"src/error_detection_analysis/calculate_performance.py","file_url":"https://github.com/psunlpgroup/realmistake/blob/HEAD/src/error_detection_analysis/calculate_performance.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"NOASSERTION","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"4f2d110dd4632edc"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}