arXiv Machine Learning

How Robust Are Automated Fact-Checking Systems? A Cross-Benchmark Evaluation

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.

arXiv AI
2d ago

Evaluating and Improving Evidence-Grounded Fact-Checking in LLMs via Multi-Round Evidence Ablation

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 AI
Sep 4

SHELF: A Synthetic Harness for Multi-Task Bibliographic Benchmarking

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