Vectara Announces Significant Step Toward Greater Reliability & Accuracy for AI Agents and Assistants with Launch of Vectara Hallucination Corrector
First-of-its-Kind Guardian Agent Builds on Vectara’s Industry Leadership in Hallucination Detection with Automated Correction & Structured Outputs for Enhanced Transparency
Vectara, the trusted platform for enterprise Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and AI-powered agents & assistants, today announced the launch of its new Hallucination Corrector as a fully integrated guardian agent within the Vectara platform. The capability – the first of its kind in the AI industry – builds upon Vectara’s established leadership in detecting and mitigating hallucinations in enterprise AI systems, empowering organizations to overcome the challenge of unreliable responses with a solution that provides both a robust explanation of each hallucination and multiple options for correcting them. It will first be available to Vectara customers as a tech preview.
Vectara Founder and CEO Amr Awadallah said, “While LLMs have recently made significant progress in addressing the issue of hallucinations, they still fall distressingly short of the standards for accuracy that are required in highly-regulated industries like financial services, healthcare, law and many others. Overcoming this challenge and the ‘trust deficit’ it creates is one of our most vital missions at Vectara, and we are excited to give organizations a powerful new capability – our Hallucination Corrector – to help them realize the full benefits of AI by ensuring unprecedented levels of accuracy.”
As a ‘guardian agent,’ the Hallucination Corrector takes protective actions to guardrail an agentic workflow. It has been shown to consistently reduce hallucination rates for LLMs with fewer than 7B parameters (which are commonly used in enterprise AI systems) to less than 1%, enabling them to match the accuracy levels of flagship models from Google and OpenAI.
The feature can also work in conjunction with Vectara’s widely-used Hughes Hallucination Evaluation Model (or HHEM), which has 4 million downloads on Hugging Face. The HHEM compares AI-generated responses to the specific source documents they were based on in order to identify any statements that are inaccurate or unsupported by the source material.
The Hallucination Corrector then takes the further protective step of providing a detailed two-part output including 1) an explanation of why the statement was considered a hallucination; and 2) a corrected version of the summary, incorporating only the minimal changes needed for accuracy (see screenshot above).
The structured output gives developers a range of options for integrating hallucination correction into their applications and agentic workflows, depending on the use case. Potential user experience options include:
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- Seamless Correction: Automatically uses the corrected output in summaries for end-users;
- Full Transparency: Displays the full explanation of the corrections alongside the suggested fix for testing applications, facilitating expert analysis among other use cases;
- Highlight Changes: Displays the corrected summary while visually highlighting the edits and providing explanations on demand;
- Correction Suggestions: Shows the original summary but uses corrections info to flag potential issues while offering the corrected summary as an optional fix; and
- Formulation Refinement: For responses that are misleading but not considered hallucinations per se, the Hallucination Corrector can refine the response to reduce its uncertainty score in line with stated parameters.
As part of the launch of the Hallucination Corrector, Vectara also released a new open-source Hallucination Correction Benchmark. This Benchmark provides the global AI industry with a standardized toolkit for measuring the performance of the Vectara Hallucination Corrector. The Benchmark’s release further underscores Vectara’s commitment to transparency and helps to establish objective measures for progress in this critical area.
Vectara Chief Product Officer Eva Nahari said, “Enterprises and AI builders alike have come to rely on Vectara as a leader in the industry-wide effort to reduce hallucinations and develop reliable, trustworthy AI applications at scale. Our new Hallucination Corrector is another significant milestone in this mission, and further enhances the quality of AI applications built on Vectara. We look forward to continuing to expand our platform and release further guardian agents to help organizations safely adopt and unlock the power of generative AI, without suffering the costly consequences of its shortcomings.”
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