The paper evaluates the robustness of automated fact‑checking systems by cross‑benchmarking nine models—including random baselines, fine‑tuned transformers, zero‑shot LLMs, and top AVeriTeC 2025 systems—across four datasets from scientific, open‑web, and climate domains. It finds that fine‑tuned models outperform zero‑shot LLMs on ClimateCheck, that system rankings vary strongly with domain and metric, and that replacing retrieved evidence with gold annotations boosts veracity accuracy by 14–22 points, underscoring retrieval as the main bottleneck. The authors provide code, pre‑processed datasets, and results to enable reproducible research.
By Aida Usmanova, Zangir Iklassov, Markus Leippold, Ricardo Usbeck
arXiv:2607. 18240v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) can achieve strong fact-checking accuracy, yet forced binary decisions conceal a critical reliability problem: systems may issue confident verdicts even when supporting evidence is weak, sparse, or internally inconsistent.
By Dekun Yang
The paper introduces Fact-Ablated Evaluation (FAE), a framework that iteratively removes cited evidence to test whether large language models (LLMs) adjust their fact‑checking predictions accordingly. Experiments reveal that many off‑the‑shelf LLMs rely more on internal knowledge than on the provided evidence. To address this, the authors propose REAL, a training method that uses counterfactual evidence supervision to encourage LLMs to base veracity judgments on evidence, achieving better evidence‑dependent performance across four datasets.
By Xingyu Deng, Mingzi Cao, Nikolaos Aletras, Xi Wang, Mark Stevenson
arXiv:2511. 03217v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) excel in generating fluent utterances but can lack reliable grounding in verified information.
By Shaghayegh Kolli, Richard Rosenbaum, Timo Cavelius, Lasse Strothe, Andrii Lata, Jana Diesner
arXiv:2608.30731v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Assessing claim check-worthiness is an essential first step in automated fact-checking pipelines. This work is motivated by a real deployment challen...
By Pratuat Amatya, Venktesh Viswanathan, Vinay Setty
Multimodal automated fact-checking (MAFC) verifies claims by retrieving and reasoning over external evidence. However, most existing static benchmarks risk contamination: they primarily consist of outdated claims verifiable using an LLM's internal knowledge without external evidence.
arXiv:2606. 27383v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as research assistants, yet it remains unclear whether they can calibrate research takeaways to the strength and scope of the supporting evidence.
By Yu Fu, Yongqi Kang, Yong Zhao
arXiv:2609.00654v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We describe the SciTrue team's participation in both subtasks of the NTCIR-19 SciClaimEval task~\cite{sciclaimeval}, which asks systems to verify scien...
By Qiming Bao, Ne\c{s}et \"Ozkan Tan, Siyuan Wang, Mark Gahegan
arXiv:2607. 23514v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal automated fact-checking (MAFC) verifies claims by retrieving and reasoning over external evidence.
By Haorui He, Xinwen Chen, Dacheng Wen, Reynold Cheng, Francis C. M. Lau, Yupeng Li
Fact-checking systems built on LLMs achieve high verdict accuracy on standard benchmarks, yet routinely output Supports labels whose cited evidence does not license the claim. Structured decomposition is the natural way to inspect those warrants, but rigid extraction protocols strip the full-claim context that facets need.
SHELF is a Python system that creates synthetic, controlled benchmark data for evaluating large language models on bibliographic tasks such as classification, clustering, retrieval, pair classification, and instruction retrieval. It generates 62,899 model-written documents based on Library of Congress vocabularies and compares methods like TF, TF‑IDF, BM25, popular encoders, and zero‑shot decoders, reporting performance metrics such as 0.8887 for subject classification and 0.2605 for genre‑form classification. The tool also allows independent variation of bibliographic facets and can produce unseen documents beyond a model’s training cutoff, with results indicating that model rankings transfer more reliably than absolute scores when compared to other benchmarks.
By Michael J. Bommarito II
arXiv:2606. 03305v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Benchmark contamination, where evaluation examples appear in a model's training data, threatens the validity of LLM assessment.
By Wojciech Zarzecki, Jan Dubi\'nski, Sebastian Cygert