Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Language Models via Retrieval Augmented Generation: A Systematic Review of n8n-Based Implementations

Authors

  • I Ketut Widhi Adnyana Institut Teknologi dan Bisnis STIKOM Bali
  • Rosalin Theophilia Tayane Universitas Sains dan Teknologi Jayapura
  • Fahmi Fahmi Universitas Swadaya Gunung Jati
  • Freddy Wicaksono Universitas Muhammadiyah Cirebon
  • Bagja Nugraha Universitas Singaperbangsa Karawang
  • Enjang Yusup Ali Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.62775/edukasia.v7i1.2141

Keywords:

Large Language Models (LLMs); Natural Language Processing (NLP); Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)

Abstract

This study systematically examines hallucination phenomena in Large Language Models (LLMs), focusing on their characteristics, causal factors, and mitigation strategies through Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and low-code orchestration platforms such as n8n. Using a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) approach based on PRISMA 2020 guidelines, this study analysed 40 peer-reviewed articles published between 2020 and 2025 from major scientific databases. The findings reveal that hallucinations are multidimensional, consisting of factual, semantic, and contextual hallucinations influenced by static training data, probabilistic token prediction, prompt ambiguity, and insufficient validation mechanisms. The review further demonstrates that RAG significantly improves factual accuracy by integrating external retrieval systems with LLM generation processes. Recent innovations such as Hybrid Retrieval and GraphRAG enhance contextual relevance and knowledge representation. A major finding of this study is the identification of “Conflict of Information” between external retrieved data and internal LLM knowledge in automated RAG pipelines. Furthermore, this study proposes a novel conceptual framework and taxonomy for hallucination mitigation in low-code AI environments, integrating retrieval, validation, conflict resolution, and workflow orchestration mechanisms. These findings contribute to the development of more reliable, transparent, and scalable AI systems.

 

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

References

Abdallah, M., & El - Beltagy, S. (2025). HalluSearch at SemEval-2025 Task 3: A Search-Enhanced RAG Pipeline for Hallucination Detection. Proceedings of the 19th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2025), 1436–1441. https://aclanthology.org/2025.semeval-1.189/

Anh-Hoang, D., Tran, V., & Nguyen, L. M. (2025). Survey and analysis of hallucinations in large language models: attribution to prompting strategies or model behavior. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 8(September), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.3389/frai.2025.1622292

Bansal, R., Reena Chandra, & Karan Lulla. (2025). Understanding and Mitigating Strategies for Large Language Model (LLMs) Hallucinations in HR Chatbots. International Journal of Computational and Experimental Science and Engineering, 11(3), 4126–4137. https://doi.org/10.22399/ijcesen.2471

Béchard, P., & Ayala, O. M. (2024). Reducing hallucination in structured outputs via Retrieval-Augmented Generation. Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, NAACL 2024, 6, 228–238. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-industry.19

Bender, E. M., Gebru, T., McMillan-Major, A., & Shmitchell, S. (2021). On the dangers of stochastic parrots: Can language models be too big? FAccT 2021 - Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, April, 610–623. https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445922

Bommasani, R., Hudson, D. A., Adeli, E., Altman, R., Arora, S., von Arx, S., Bernstein, M. S., Bohg, J., Bosselut, A., Brunskill, E., Brynjolfsson, E., Buch, S., Card, D., Castellon, R., Chatterji, N., Chen, A., Creel, K., Davis, J. Q., Demszky, D., … Liang, P. (2022). On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models. 1–214.

Chen, H. (2024). Optimal Rate of Convergence for Vector-valued Wiener-Itô Integral. Alea (Rio de Janeiro), 21(11731009), 179–214. https://doi.org/10.30757/ALEA.v21-08

Ding, H., Pang, L., Wei, Z., Shen, H., & Cheng, X. (2025). Rowen: Adaptive Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Hallucination Mitigation in LLMs. In SIGIR-AP 2025 - Proceedings of the 2025 Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval in the Asia Pacific Region (Vol. 1, Issue 1). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.1145/3767695.3769500

Farquhar, S., Kossen, J., Kuhn, L., & Gal, Y. (2024). Detecting hallucinations in large language models using semantic entropy. Nature, 632, 1–10. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07421-4

Formal, T., Lassance, C., Piwowarski, B., & Clinchant, S. (2022). From Distillation to Hard Negative Sampling: Making Sparse Neural IR Models More Effective. In SIGIR 2022 - Proceedings of the 45th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (Vol. 1, Issue 1). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3477495.3531857

Gao, Y., et al. (2023). RAG vs Fine-tuning: Pipelines, Tradeoffs, and a Case Study on Agriculture. ArXiv Preprint ArXiv. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2401.08406

Gao, L., Dai, Z., Pasupat, P., Chen, A., Chaganty, A. T., Fan, Y., Zhao, V. Y., Lao, N., Lee, H., Juan, D. C., & Guu, K. (2023). RARR: Researching and Revising What Language Models Say, Using Language Models. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 1, 16477–16508. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.910

Holtzman, A., Buys, J., Du, L., Forbes, M., & Choi, Y. (2020). THE CURIOUS CASE OF NEURAL TEXT DeGENERATION. 8th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2020.

Huang, L., Yu, W., Ma, W., Zhong, W., Feng, Z., Wang, H., Chen, Q., Peng, W., Feng, X., Qin, B., & Liu, T. (2025). A Survey on Hallucination in Large Language Models: Principles, Taxonomy, Challenges, and Open Questions. ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 43(2), 1–58. https://doi.org/10.1145/3703155

Ji, Z., et al. (2024). Survey of Hallucination in Natural Language Generation. ACM Computing Surveys, 55(12), 1–38. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1145/3571730

Ji, Z., Yu, T., Xu, Y., Lee, N., Ishii, E., & Fung, P. (2023). Towards Mitigating Hallucination in Large Language Models via Self-Reflection. Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, 1827–1843. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.123

Kovács, Á., & Recski, G. (2025). LettuceDetect: A Hallucination Detection Framework for RAG Applications. http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.17125

Lavrinovics, E., Biswas, R., Bjerva, J., & Hose, K. (2025). Knowledge Graphs, Large Language Models, and Hallucinations: An NLP Perspective. Journal of Web Semantics, 85, 100844. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.websem.2024.100844

Lewis, P., Perez, E., Piktus, A., Petroni, F., Karpukhin, V., Goyal, N., Küttler, H., Lewis, M., Yih, W. T., Rocktäschel, T., Riedel, S., & Kiela, D. (2020). Retrieval-augmented generation for knowledge-intensive NLP tasks. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2020-Decem.

Li, Y., Fu, X., Verma, G., Buitelaar, P., & Liu, M. (2025). Mitigating Hallucination in Large Language Models (LLMs): An Application-Oriented Survey on RAG, Reasoning, and Agentic Systems. Arxiv, 1–25. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2510.24476

Maulana, T. I., & Abdillah, A. R. (2022). Pemanfaatan sistem temu kembali informasi dalam pencarian dokumen menggunakan vektor space model. SINTESIA: Jurnal Sistem Dan Teknologi Informasi Indonesia, 1(2), 89–95.

Meister, C., Pimentel, T., Wiher, G., & Cotterell, R. (2023). Locally Typical Sampling. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 11, 102–121. https://doi.org/10.1162/tacl_a_00536

Niu, C., Wu, Y., Zhu, J., Xu, S., Shum, K., Zhong, R., Song, J., & Zhang, T. (2024). RAGTruth: A Hallucination Corpus for Developing Trustworthy Retrieval-Augmented Language Models. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 1, 10862–10878. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.585

OpenAI, Achiam, J., Adler, S., Agarwal, S., Ahmad, L., Akkaya, I., Aleman, F. L., Almeida, D., Altenschmidt, J., Altman, S., Anadkat, S., Avila, R., Babuschkin, I., Balaji, S., Balcom, V., Baltescu, P., Bao, H., Bavarian, M., Belgum, J., … Zoph, B. (2024). GPT-4 Technical Report. 4, 1–100.

Page, M. J., Mckenzie, J. E., Bossuyt, P. M., Boutron, I., Hoffmann, C., Mulrow, C. D., Shamseer, L., Tetzlaff, J. M., Akl, E. A., Brennan, S. E., Chou, R., Glanville, J., Grimshaw, J. M., Hróbjartsson, A., Lalu, M. M., Li, T., Loder, E. W., Mayo-wilson, E., Mcdonald, S., … Moher, D. (2021). The PRISMA 2020 statement : an updated guideline for reporting systematic reviews. BMJ. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.n71

Page, M. J., Moher, D., Bossuyt, P. M., Boutron, I., Hoffmann, T. C., Mulrow, C. D., Shamseer, L., Tetzlaff, J. M., Akl, E. A., Brennan, S. E., Chou, R., Glanville, J., Grimshaw, J. M., Hróbjartsson, A., Lalu, M. M., Li, T., Loder, E. W., Mayo-Wilson, E., Mcdonald, S., … Mckenzie, J. E. (2021). PRISMA 2020 explanation and elaboration: Updated guidance and exemplars for reporting systematic reviews. The BMJ, 372. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.n160

Pan, S., Luo, L., Wang, Y., Chen, C., Wang, J., & Wu, X. (2024). Unifying Large Language Models and Knowledge Graphs: A Roadmap. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 36(7), 3580–3599. https://doi.org/10.1109/TKDE.2024.3352100

Pielken, H. J., Urbanitz, D., Koch, P., & van de Loo, J. (2021). Immunological monitoring in remission acute myeloid leukemia during maintenance therapy. Haematology and Blood Transfusion, 30, 385–386. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-71213-5_65

Purwanto, Wijaya, F., Bernadisman, D., Sutar, & Amrullah, M. (2026). Aplikasi Interaktif Berbasis R Studio Untuk Prediksi Nilai Ujian Mahasiswa Menggunakan Algoritma Random Forest Dengan Evaluasi Multi-Variabel. Jurnal Sistem Informasi Dan Teknologi (SINTEK), 6, 127–135. https://doi.org/10.56995/sintek.v6i1.255

Qi, F., Hou, Y., Lin, N., Bao, S., & Xu, N. (2024). A Survey of Testing Techniques Based on Large Language Models. ACM International Conference Proceeding Series, 0, 280–284. https://doi.org/10.1145/3675249.3675298

Rahman, S. S., Islam, M. A., Alam, M. M., Zeba, M., Rahman, M. A., Chowa, S. S., Raiaan, M. A. K., & Azam, S. (2026). Hallucination to truth: a review of fact-checking and factuality evaluation in large language models. Artificial Intelligence Review, 59(2). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10462-025-11454-w

Riza, F., Jamal Al Din, S., Yusuf Al Afghani, D., Setiabudi, R., & Teknologi Budi Utomo, I. (2025). LLM-based self-related local ai agent design through n8n orchestration for conversational memory on rag. Journal of Information Technology and Computer Science (INTECOMS), 8(3), 2025.

Sun, Z., Zang, X., Zheng, K., Xu, J., Zhang, X., Yu, W., Song, Y., & Li, H. (2025). Redeep: Detecting Hallucination in Retrieval-Augmented Generation Via Mechanistic Interpretability. 13th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2025, 102578–102607.

Thakur, N., Reimers, N., Rücklé, A., Srivastava, A., & Gurevych, I. (2021). BEIR: A Heterogeneous Benchmark for Zero-shot Evaluation of Information Retrieval Models. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems.

Tonmoy, S. M. T. I., Zaman, S. M. M., Jain, V., Rani, A., Rawte, V., Chadha, A., & Das, A. (2024). A Comprehensive Survey of Hallucination Mitigation Techniques in Large Language Models.

Vishwakarma, V. K. (2025). Designing Agent-Native Automation in n8n: A Scalable Framework Integrating AI Agents, Multi-Agent Systems, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation. International Journal for Research in Applied Science and Engineering Technology, 13(11), 1044–1054. https://doi.org/10.22214/ijraset.2025.75231

Xu, S., Yan, Z., Dai, C., & Wu, F. (2025). MEGA-RAG: a retrieval-augmented generation framework with multi-evidence guided answer refinement for mitigating hallucinations of LLMs in public health. Frontiers in Public Health, 13. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2025.1635381

Yeh, S., Li, S., & Mallick, T. (2026). LUMINA: Detecting Hallucinations in RAG System with Context-Knowledge Signals. Arxiv, 1–19. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2509.21875

Yu, W., Yu, X., Zhang, Y., Li, X., & Cheng, N. (2025). REPLUG: Retrieval-augmented black-box language models. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1109/TKDE.2025.3356789

Zhang, W., & Zhang, J. (2025). Hallucination Mitigation for Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models: A Review. Mathematics, 13, 856. https://doi.org/10.3390/math13050856

Downloads

Published

2026-07-04

Issue

Section

Articles

How to Cite

Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Language Models via Retrieval Augmented Generation: A Systematic Review of n8n-Based Implementations. (2026). EDUKASIA Jurnal Pendidikan Dan Pembelajaran, 7(1), 605-618. https://doi.org/10.62775/edukasia.v7i1.2141