The Cost of Compression: A Rate-Distortion Limit on Factual Hallucination

Excerpt

arXiv:2609.12111v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Factual hallucination in closed-book question answering is often treated as a coverage problem: a model fails because the relevant fact is absent from its internal memory. This view misses a second source of error. Even when a fact has been observed, finite memory may force it to be stored only approximately. We study this effect through a simple coverage--compression model of factual recall. We consider an unstructured question-answering task with