Understanding LLM Hallucinations Caused by Soft Errors

Jinghao Wen, Dongning Ma, Ruixuan Wang, Shaohuang Wang, Xun Jiao

While hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs) have been extensively studied from a software perspective, limited attention has been paid to hardware-level factors. In this paper, we performed a case study to understand LLM hallucination caused by soft errors on hardware. We introduce LLMEI to inject soft errors into LLMs during inference, based on what we evaluate the impact of soft error across diverse LLM architectures and tasks, including mathematical reasoning and code generation. We summarize the taxonomy of different failure modes based on LLM hallucination behaviors and analyze their distributions under different error rates. Our find- ings underscore the hallucination-specific diagnostics within the reliability of LLM implementation on hardware.