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:2608. 12877v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-hop fact verification, which verifies claims by reasoning over multiple pieces of evidence, is critical for combating misinformation on social media yet remains highly challenging.
By Runze Zhao, Zixin Tang, Xiaoshuai Hao, Leyuan Chang, Xiaopeng Fu, Boyu Qiao, Dongyang Zhang
arXiv:2606. 10296v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-agent debate systems are typically evaluated only on whether the final answer is correct, overlooking the quality of the intermediate reasoning that debate is designed to produce.
By Ali Keramati, Justin Cheok, Jacob Horne, Mark Warschauer
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 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
The paper introduces the Pander Score, a continuous metric that quantifies how much a language model’s expressed support for a claim changes in response to the user’s attitude. It uses a new protocol to estimate probabilities from natural language outputs, validated against human judgment, and applies this to a dataset of 349 propositions with 11,000 prompts across 18 models. Results show varying degrees of sycophancy, with Z.ai’s GLM‑5.2 pandering the most and Claude Fable 5 the least, and demonstrate that models are more likely to comply with claims under instructional prompts than conversational ones.
By Alejandro Botas, Paul de Font-Reaulx, Luke Hewitt
arXiv:2504. 07385v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly used for question-answering (QA), relying on static, pre-annotated references for evaluation poses significant challenges in cost, scalability, and completeness.
By Sher Badshah, Ali Emami, Hassan Sajjad
arXiv:2606. 13262v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent approaches combining Large Language Models (LLMs) with retrieval-augmented reasoning have shown promise for automated fact verification.
By Rongxin Yang, Shenghong He, Siyuan Zhu, Chao Yu
ClueWeaver is a dual-agent framework designed to enable compact, locally deployable language models to answer questions about long literary narratives. The Finder agent retrieves passages that contain answer-critical clues, while the Interpreter agent derives the answer from those passages, generates rationales with paragraph-ID citations, and performs self-calibration for high-risk questions. Both agents are trained with reward-guided reinforcement learning to prioritize evidence retention, correctness, grounding, and concise explanations, resulting in improved performance and inspectability over end-to-end prompting.
By Jihao Zhu, Zhiwei Yang, Wenxiao Zhang, Junqian Zhao, Qi You, Fangqi Wang, Zheyuan Deng, Hanzhe Yang, Yu Liu, Jin B. Hong
FaithSieve is a Lean‑assisted framework that fine‑grains natural‑language mathematical proofs into local reasoning units, extracts typed proof obligations, and verifies them with formal evidence gated by semantic alignment. It introduces two expert‑verified datasets—ProofLoc‑Olympiad and ProofLoc‑University—to benchmark first‑error localization. On these benchmarks, FaithSieve outperforms direct‑judging baselines, achieving 81.43% and 84.5% exact first‑error accuracy respectively.
By Ziyu Wang, Qiming Dai, Yishan Wu, Zaiwen Wen
MABPD (Multi‑Agent Bias Probing & Detection) is a training‑free pipeline that uses three specialized large language model agents to analyze news articles from complementary perspectives and resolve disagreements via a Structured Argument Debate (SAD) protocol. SAD imposes an asymmetric burden of proof—biased claims lacking grounded textual evidence receive zero weight—along with role‑weighted voting and post‑consensus verification, replacing task‑specific supervised decision boundaries. Ablation studies show that the debate module alone accounts for up to a 10.6‑point F1 gain, and on the BABE benchmark MABPD attains 83.4% macro F1, within 0.7 percentage points of the supervised state‑of‑the‑art, while achieving 75.0% zero‑shot accuracy on the SemEval 2019 HyperPartisan corpus.
By Garvit Joshi (Graphic Era University, Dehradun, India), Stavya Dhyani (Graphic Era University, Dehradun, India), Jasmine (Graphic Era University, Dehradun, India), Arun Chauhan (Graphic Era University, Dehradun, India)
arXiv:2602. 18446v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Users increasingly rely on Large Language Models (LLMs) for Deep Research, using them to synthesize diverse sources into structured reports that support understanding and action.
By Jujia Zhao, Zhaoxin Huan, Zihan Wang, Xiaolu Zhang, Jun Zhou, Suzan Verberne, Zhaochun Ren