”A Midsummer Night’s Dream” quest for truth: From ChatGPT “hallucinations” to RAG reasoning and ACURAI precision — a scoping review on detection, minimizing, and (almost) complete error elimination and enhancing Large Language Models' re-liability

Abstract

Like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, large language models (LLMs) exhibit vast imagination, drawing on massive training datasets. However, they may fabricate or mix information, lacking mechanisms to verify real-world sources. Most commercial LLMs, including those used in medicine, remain prone to hallucinations—plausible but false content. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) aims to address this by grounding LLM outputs in real-time access to verified sources like scientific databases. A 2023–2025 PubMed search identified 91 papers on RAG and LLM applications across biomedical domains; 78 were useful for our paper, adressing medical domains. RAG techniques significantly reduce hallucinations by ensuring that only validated information informs model outputs. ACURAI, an advanced system based on “phrase dominance and discrete functional units (DFUs),” further enhances LLM accuracy. Tested on a novel “RAG-Truth Dataset Caveats,” ACURAI eliminated 91–100% of junk outputs in GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. While LLMs can resemble Puck (creative yet unreliable), ACURAI, aided by RAG, acts more like Theseus, grounding answers in verified data. This framework strengthens the possible role of LLMs in clinical diagnosis, academic writing, and patient education, offering a practical path toward safer and more accurate medical AI. Ultimately, human oversight remains key to interpreting and validating AI-generated outputs.

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