Single-Pass Uncertainty Heads for Claim-Level Hallucination Detection in Persian Medical Language Models

arXiv:2610.03482 · cs.CL · Submitted 2026-10-02 · Read on arXiv

cs.CL

Submitted: 2026-10-02

Updated: 2026-10-07

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

The gist: Hallucination detection is particularly important for medical language models, but repeated-sampling approaches are computationally expensive.

Terminology

Abstract

Hallucination detection is particularly important for medical language models, but repeated-sampling approaches are computationally expensive. A faster alternative is a single-pass uncertainty head that predicts hallucination risk from a frozen generator's internal signals. Existing uncertainty heads consume backbone-specific features and tokenization, motivating adaptation when the backbone or language changes. We study two Persian medical models, Gaokerena-V and Gaokerena-R, on a 168-question Iranian medical entrance examination. Across five generations per question, Gaokerena-V produces the same option on only 14 questions and Gaokerena-R on 37, compared with 168 for Med-Gemma, indicating substantial response variability in the Gaokerena models. We therefore adapt the LLM Uncertainty Head (LUH) framework to these models and construct two paired claim-level hallucination datasets directly in Persian, with 1,600 responses per backbone. Lightweight heads are trained on frozen-backbone attention maps and token probabilities. On held-out test splits, the heads achieve PR-AUCs of 0.4820 and 0.4652, corresponding to 2.30 and 2.66 times their respective random baselines, and ROC-AUCs of 0.7852 and 0.7810. The resulting detectors require neither retrieval nor repeated sampling at inference.

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