arXiv AI

Calibrated Selective Fact-Checking via Evidence Chain Evaluation

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.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 18

Judge, Retrieve, or Abstain: Uncertainty-Guarded LLM Judging with Provable Risk Guarantees

The paper introduces a risk‑controlled framework for using large language models (LLMs) as judges in tasks without reference answers. By calibrating uncertainty thresholds on a held‑out set, the method ensures that the false discovery rate of accepted verdicts stays below a user‑specified level α with high probability, using finite‑sample Clopper–Pearson intervals. When the parametric judge lacks confidence, the instance is routed to a retrieval‑augmented mode with a second calibrated threshold, preserving the error guarantee while achieving higher coverage than single‑mode baselines.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

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.

By Aida Usmanova, Zangir Iklassov, Markus Leippold, Ricardo Usbeck
arXiv AI
Sep 10

AtomCite: Verification and Correction of Supplied Page-Level Citations in Multi-Page Documents

AtomCite is an agentic framework that verifies and corrects page‑level citations in multi‑page documents by parsing answers into claims, checking each claim against the cited page image, and applying a deterministic repair policy. The authors introduce DocCite, the first benchmark for this task, built on MP‑DocVQA and DUDE, containing 928 injected instances and 1,909 verified natural errors. Across Gemini, Claude, and GPT models, AtomCite achieves about 93% verification accuracy and improves citation precision from 34% to 87‑90%, while also enhancing hallucination detection in open‑source models.

By Chen Qian, Yimeng Wang, Yu Chen, Lingfei Wu, Andreas Stathopoulos
arXiv AI
Sep 10

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 Computation and Language
Aug 28

AEScorer: An Agentic Evidence-Grounded Framework for Graded Factuality Verification

AEScorer is an agentic evidence‑grounded framework designed for graded factuality verification, addressing the limitation of binary judgments in current methods. It operates in two stages: first, it gathers and refines external evidence through agentic search; second, it predicts a scalar factuality score to capture nuanced differences in correctness. The authors also introduce GradedVeriBench, a benchmark covering general and multi‑hop question answering, and demonstrate that AEScorer outperforms existing approaches on this new benchmark.

By Hui Huang, Muyun Yang, Yuki Arase
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

R2VC: Modular Fact-Checking with Retrieval, Verification, and Confidence Calibration

R2VC is a modular fact‑checking system that separates retrieval, reasoning, verification, and confidence calibration. It uses hybrid sparse‑plus‑dense Wikipedia retrieval, a fine‑tuned generator for structured verdicts, an NLI cross‑encoder for selecting evidence‑based candidates, and a lightweight calibrator for confidence and abstention. On the FEVER benchmark, R2VC improves accuracy by 13.74% over a baseline and shows that verifier‑based candidate selection and calibration are key contributors to performance.

By Dhruv Dixit, Paritosh Pandey
arXiv AI
Aug 26

Generating Biomedical Fact-Checking Reports with RL-Enhanced Agentic Search

The paper introduces BioCheck Agent, an LLM-based system that generates structured biomedical fact‑checking reports using agentic search and a reinforcement‑learning framework called EG‑GRPO. Unlike prior methods that output only supported or refuted labels, BioCheck Agent synthesizes conclusions with retrieved evidence from PubMed, employing advanced Boolean search operators. Experiments show that, compared to the base Qwen3.5‑4B model, BioCheck Agent improves label prediction accuracy on SciFact by 9.95 %, raises evidence quality by 3.7 %, and reduces hallucinations by 19.63 %.

By Jiongxiao Wang, Dingli Ma, Chaoqun Ni