Reliability Scales Inversely: Hallucinations Snowball Faster in Bigger Language Models
Bigger language models are less reliable. Across three families, three benchmarks and six rungs, including in-the-wild chat logs, scaling closes the start-of-response knowledge gap up to $7\times$ while within-response knowledge degradation grows up to $39\times$. We trace that residual to one variable, the per-position disagreement $δ= \log p_M - \log p_O$ against a stronger oracle, whose second moment splits exactly into bias$^2$ $\mathrm{KL}(p_M \,\|\, p_O)^2$ and decoding risk $\mathrm{Var}[δ]$. That split is an interpretability statement before it is a statistical one: the model's self-readable uncertainty $H(p_M)$ enters only the bias term, so the risk term has no model-readable com...
| Authors | Kushal Chakrabarti |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 30 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 28 July 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.