alt Hacker NewsMy gut feeling is that the hallucinations are caused by the entropy. A UUID has unlikely character sequences. But the entropy is a core feature. Turning the UUID into words keeps the same entropy, you just have surprising words instead of surprising hex sequences.
I would be surprised if this actually helped with hallucinations. Happy to be proven wrong though, and this seems like an easy experiment to run: just take a tiny model (below 1B) and have it transcribe a couple thousand ids in both formats, then check where it made more mistakes
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But within the surprising words, the adjacent tokens are common. I can see an argument for having fewer transcription errors on badger-yellow-alternate than 0B9A26F3C74D.
Your test with small models makes tons of sense. Would be interesting to graph to two approaches against model size and recency.
I had similar thoughts. The readme intro explicitly mentions hallucinations, that's why I thought I'd ask.
If you're dealing with uid in -> uid out, where you're hoping to get the same uid out, intuitively the entropy would be greatly reduced anyways. Then the question becomes, are words conducive to keeping input->output consistent, given the way LLMs work (e.g. attention mechanism)? I could see it go either way, that's why I'm supporting the idea of running your experiment.