{"ID":5675989,"CreatedAt":"2026-07-03T01:40:09.565152011Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-07-04T20:19:25.911659489Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.01457","arxiv_id":"2607.01457","title":"Grounded Optimization: A Layered Engineering Framework for Reducing LLM Hallucination in Automated Personal Document Rewriting","abstract":"Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to resume optimization for applicant tracking systems, introducing hallucination failures distinct from general text generation: anachronistic technology injection, cross-domain terminology contamination, structural mutation, and content fabrication. We present Grounded Optimization, a five-layer framework combining temporal context validation, deterministic contamination detection, structural invariant enforcement, prompt-level grounding, and an evaluator agent. In ablation experiments across three LLMs, four temperature settings, and six layer configurations on 25 synthetic resumes spanning 14 industries, undefended baselines produce 2.48-5.36 detected hallucinations per resume. Among detectors independent of the active defenses, temporal hallucinations are reduced by 50-95% across all conditions; overall detected hallucination rate falls to 0.04-0.24. Prompt-level grounding alone achieves zero detected hallucinations at low temperature with a capable instruction-following model; higher temperatures and weaker models reveal the need for the deterministic layers as a complement. We release the contamination taxonomy, evaluation code, and raw data.","short_abstract":"Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to resume optimization for applicant tracking systems, introducing hallucination failures distinct from general text generation: anachronistic technology injection, cross-domain terminology contamination, structural mutation, and content fabrication. We present Grou...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.01457","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.01457v1","authors":"[\"Shashank Indukuri\",\"Adarsh Agrawal\"]","published":"2026-07-01T20:22:18Z","proceeding":"cs.CL","tasks":"[\"cs.CL\",\"cs.AI\"]","methods":"[\"Large Language Model\",\"Language Model\"]","has_code":false}