D$^2$HScore: Reasoning-Aware Hallucination Detection via Semantic Breadth and Depth Analysis in LLMs

Abstract

Although large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success, their practical application is often hindered by the generation of non-factual content, which is called "hallucination". Ensuring the reliability of LLMs' outputs is a critical challenge, particularly in high-stakes domains such as finance, security, and healthcare. In this work, we revisit hallucination detection from the perspective of model architecture and generation dynamics. Leveraging the multi-layer structure and autoregressive decoding process of LLMs, we decompose hallucination signals into two complementary dimensions: the semantic breadth of token representations within each layer, and the semantic depth of core concepts as they evolve across layers. Based on this insight, we propose \textbf{D$^2$HScore (Dispersion and Drift-based Hallucination Score)}, a training-free and label-free framework that jointly measures: (1) \textbf{Intra-Layer Dispersion}, which quantifies the semantic diversity of token representations within each layer; and (2) \textbf{Inter-Layer Drift}, which tracks the progressive transformation of key token representations across layers. To ensure drift reflects the evolution of meaningful semantics rather than noisy or redundant tokens, we guide token selection using attention signals. By capturing both the horizontal and vertical dynamics of representation during inference, D$^2$HScore provides an interpretable and lightweight proxy for hallucination detection. Extensive experiments across five open-source LLMs and five widely used benchmarks demonstrate that D$^2$HScore consistently outperforms existing training-free baselines.