CoFact: Dynamic Coordination of Attention Heads for Improving Factual Consistency in LLMs

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Authors: Association for Artificial Intelligence 2026, Shike Li, XIAOFENG LIU, Xin Tong, Xiaokai Wang, Hu Zhang
Cited by: 0

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) frequently generate fluent yet factually inaccurate content, a phenomenon known as hallucination. Recent inference-time approaches aim to improve truthfulness by steering model activations toward semantically meaningful directions. While effective to some extent, these methods typically process activations independently, neglecting the internal coordination structure of multi-head attention (MHA), where attention heads interact to form semantic representations. In this work, we propose CoFact, an adaptive inference-time mechanism that improves factual consistency by dynamically coordinating attention head behaviors. Inspired by cooperative game theory, CoFact conceptualizes attention heads as collaborative agents. It models the semantic utility and redundancy of each head and adaptively modulates their contributions to the final attention output. Notably, rather than directly altering intermediate representations, CoFact performs token-level coordination to encourage diverse and complementary attention patterns across heads. CoFact is plug-and-play compatible with mainstream LLM architectures and requires no additional supervision or model retraining. Experimental results across multiple standard factuality benchmarks demonstrate that CoFact consistently enhances factual accuracy while maintaining generation fluency.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Topic Modeling Natural Language Processing Techniques Multimodal Machine Learning Applications

Publication details

Journal / source
Underline Science Inc.
Publication date
7 January 2026
Language
EN