Gray-Box Hallucination Detection in LLMs with Token Identities

Abstract

Large language models often produce fluent but factually incorrect output. Gray-box detectors identify such hallucinations from the token-probability statistics emitted during generation, avoiding the need for white-box access to hidden states that frontier models do not provide. These detectors, however, typically rely only on probability-derived representations and ignore the identities of the candidate tokens. They can therefore observe how uncertain the model is, but not what it is uncertain about. Consequently, they cannot distinguish between a model that is torn between"big"and"small"and one that is torn between"big"and"huge"when the two pairs receive the same probability distribution. We introduce GURI (Gray-box Uncertainty Representations with Identity), a lightweight gray-box hallucination detector that combines candidate-token probabilities with per-token vector identifiers. This exposes which alternatives the model considered while preserving the accessibility and transferability of the gray-box setting. Across three open-weight models and three question-answering benchmarks, GURI increases mean test ROC-AUC from 72.09% to 79.09% over a probability-only baseline. On the closed-source GPT-4.1 model, mean ROC-AUC increases from 67.39% to 71.84%. Among the three open-weight models, GURI outperforms transferred probability-only baseline in 17 of 18 directed cross-model transfers without fine-tuning. For the three open-weight models, cross-dataset transfer between HotpotQA and TriviaQA with the model held fixed improves mean ROC-AUC over transferred LOS-Net by 3.76 points.