Beyond Document Grounding: Span-Level Hallucination Detection over Code, Tool Output, and Documents
Ádám Kovács, Bowei He, Xue Liu, István Boros, Szilveszter Tóth, Gábor Recski
Abstract
Hallucination detection for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is usually evaluated on natural-language document evidence. However, grounded generation systems increasingly rely on structured inputs: source code, developer-tool output, markdown documents, tables, and repository metadata. We introduce a unified benchmark for span-level hallucination detection over code, tool output, structured documents, and existing natural-language RAG datasets. The benchmark is built by starting from grounded correct answers, injecting localized hallucinations with exact character labels, and validating the code test split with evidence-based review. Our fine-tuned Qwen3.5-2B detector reaches 0.689 span-F1 on the unified test set and 0.60 on the code-agent source, where it substantially outperforms LettuceDetect-large (0.17) and the strongest zero-shot LLM judges we evaluated (at most 0.22). The same model remains competitive on established natural-language benchmarks, with 81.8 RAGTruth example-F1 and 0.724 English PsiloQA IoU.
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Classified with taxonomy v2 on Wed, 2 Sept 2026.