Papers › Trusting Your Evidence: Hallucinate Less with Context-aware Decoding

Trusting Your Evidence: Hallucinate Less with Context-aware Decoding

24 May 2023arXiv:2305.14739archive 2025-07-28

Weijia Shi, Xiaochuang Han, Mike Lewis, Yulia Tsvetkov, Luke Zettlemoyer, Scott Wen-tau Yih

Language models (LMs) often struggle to pay enough attention to the input context, and generate texts that are unfaithful or contain hallucinations. To mitigate this issue, we present context-aware decoding (CAD), which follows a contrastive output distribution that amplifies the difference between the output probabilities when a model is used with and without context. Our experiments show that CAD, without additional training, significantly improves the faithfulness of different LM families, including OPT, GPT, LLaMA and FLAN-T5 for summarization tasks (e.g., 14.3% gain for LLaMA in factuality metrics). Furthermore, CAD is particularly effective in overriding a model's prior knowledge when it contradicts the provided context, leading to substantial improvements in tasks where resolving the knowledge conflict is essential.

PaperPDFCodeCode Syntology ran

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

For agents, Syntology's MCP tool lists every function and class Syntology harvested from this paper and whether it ran (how to connect): get_harvested_code_for_paper(arxiv_id="2305.14739")

Code

Syntology Ran 2 of 2 code samples harvested from 1 repository linked to this paper; 0 have no recorded run. Of those that ran: 2 ran · our draft was wrong.

By repository: community (archive-listed): 2 samples from 1 repository, 2 ran. The run record, sample by sample. “Ran” means executed on a synthesized input, not that the code is correct or reproduces the paper.

danshi777/ircan mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
hongshi97/cad mentioned on GitHubMIT report
xhan77/context-aware-decoding mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

2 samples harvested; 2 ran; 0 honoured the contract we drafted; 0 have no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-24; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.

2ran · our draft was wrong

Licence: 2 of the 2 samples are pointer only, meaning Syntology does not serve that copy's text. This page shows no code text for any sample; each one links to its file in the repository.

Harvested from xhan77/context-aware-decoding. “Ran” means the sample executed on a synthesized input. It does not mean the output is correct, and nothing here reproduces the paper's results. “Honoured” and “violated” refer to a contract Syntology drafted from the code itself; “our draft was wrong” and “fixture could not drive it” are failures of Syntology's instrument, not of the code.

Each sample ends with its code_sha256, Syntology's identity for that exact code. An agent fetches the stored sample with Syntology's MCP tool get_code(code_sha256="…") (how to connect); click an identity to copy that call.

Repository labels, per sample. official repository: The archive marks this repository official for the paper. named in the paper: The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official. community (archive-listed): In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper. found in paper text by Syntology: 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. Samples from a repository marked official are listed first. Licence labels name the repository's licence as recorded at harvest. “Pointer only” means Syntology does not serve that copy's text, for one of four reasons: no licence file was found; the licence was not identified; the licence is recorded as permissive but that copy's record is not marked cleared; or the licence is outside the permissive list Syntology serves text under (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD and similar). Some licences outside that list permit redistribution, such as WTFPL, and GPL-3.0 under its conditions; they are simply not on the list. Hover a licence label for the reason. File links open the file on GitHub at the default branch, which may have changed since the harvest.

filter_logits_top_p xhan77/context-aware-decoding/group_decode_fileio.py community (archive-listed) ran · our draft was wrong fingerprinted no licence file found · pointer only · f7f3406017d1fe8f · report
logits_sampling_projection xhan77/context-aware-decoding/group_decode_fileio.py community (archive-listed) ran · our draft was wrong fingerprinted no licence file found · pointer only · 38e8900c2c3f23d4 · report

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

AdamAttentionAttention DropoutBPECosine AnnealingDense ConnectionsDiscriminative Fine-TuningDropoutFlan-T5GPTLayer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Cosine AnnealingMulti-Head AttentionOPTResidual ConnectionSoftmaxWeight Decay

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections