When Bias Pretends to Be Truth: How Spurious Correlations Undermine Hallucination Detection in LLMs

Kari Jaaskelainen

11 Nov 2025 — 1 min read

Why do AI models sometimes sound sure while being wrong? This study spotlights a subtle culprit: spurious correlations—strong but misleading patterns in training data (like linking certain surnames to a nationality).

These shortcuts make LLMs produce confident, wrong answers.
Making models bigger doesn’t fix it.
Popular detectors—confidence filters and inner-state probes—miss these cases.
Even refusal/guardrail fine-tuning doesn’t fully remove them.

Confidence is not correctness—it’s often just the strength of a learned pattern.

Why detectors fail: when models internalize biased patterns, high confidence reflects the pattern’s statistical weight, not the truth of the output. So confidence-based screening and probing can be systematically misled.

What’s needed: methods that actively break or test these shortcuts—think counterfactual checks, causal interventions, grounding against verified sources, and training that penalizes reliance on spurious signals.

Paper by Shaowen Wang, Yiqi Dong, Ruinian Chang, Tansheng Zhu, Yuebo Sun, Kaifeng Lyu, Jian Li. Read more: http://arxiv.org/abs/2511.07318v1

Paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/2511.07318v1

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