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 However, most existing static benchmarks risk contamination: they primarily consist of outdated claims verifiable using an LLM's internal knowledge without external evidence.
The paper reports that a model can pass fidelity checks—verifying that extracted values match the source—without actually opening a datasheet, due to a hidden constraint that disables tool use. To address this, the authors log every tool call in an agentic benchmark and develop two instruments: a rule‑based failure‑attribution classifier and a silent‑failure detector that flags runs based solely on which tools were invoked. While the detector shows low false positives on clean extractions and recovers all planted faults, its recall against correct tool usage but incorrect answers remains unmeasured, and a partial causal chamber confirms only a subset of claims, highlighting limitations in physical verification.
By Qing Ye, Meng-Hsuan Lin
arXiv:2608. 03372v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI systems rewrite information constantly: conversations become stored memories, documents become answers.
By Alex Kwon
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
Automated fact-checking (AFC) systems retrieve evidence and predict claim veracity, yet evaluations omit simple baselines, systems are developed for a single benchmark and cannot be trusted to general...
arXiv:2608. 12652v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Benchmark contamination is diagnosed today with n-gram overlap, with likelihood-based membership inference, or with canary strings, and each needs something usually unavailable: the training corpus, a well-chosen test statistic, or foresight at dataset release.
By Florian Braun
arXiv:2607. 12650v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tool access alone does not make LLM empirical reasoning governable: accepted outputs need not descend from attested evidence, and accepted deductions need not hold up under formal scrutiny.
By Junyu Ren
arXiv:2609.22818v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Memory-poisoning defenses for LLM agents are typically evaluated by their ability to prevent attacks. However, the traffic they process is rarely adv...
By Pritom Bhowmik
arXiv:2608.21230v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Persistent memory makes false information durable: once a false statement is stored, it can be retrieved into future sessions that match it. We measu...
By Arulnidhi Karunanidhi
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 ClaimReceipt, a specification and verifier that checks whether a claim in an agent evaluation can be recomputed from retained evidence (sufficiency) and whether the evidence covers the entire experiment set (coverage). Using the CR‑2 verifier on 1,392 historical records, the authors demonstrate accurate reproduction of audit verdicts, non‑redundant field groups, and zero false positives on semantic faults. In a prospective CR‑3 run, the system correctly flags missing receipts and preserves coverage when private evidence is withheld, while adding minimal overhead to inference time and transaction size.
By Peiying Zhu, Sidi Chang
JuryProbe is an empirical diagnostic tool designed to assess consensus risk in panels of reference‑free large language model judges used for factuality verification. It estimates risk by measuring false‑negative correlations and false‑consensus lift from a labeled calibration probe, and routes high‑risk majority decisions to judges with trusted references. The approach was validated on FEVER corruptions, showing that flagged decisions can be grounded without additional reference acquisition in most cases, while reducing false accepts by about 0.4% and avoiding 28% of reference acquisitions.
By Tianxin Zhou, Ruixi Lin