The paper audits the widely used ISOT/Kaggle Fake and Real News corpus and finds that extremely high reported accuracies (≈0.98) are largely due to shortcut signals rather than genuine veracity detection. A simple TF‑IDF linear classifier achieves perfect F1 when using only subject metadata, and even after removing metadata, newswire tags, and duplicate documents, the F1 drops only modestly, indicating that editorial style rather than specific tokens drives performance. Under topic‑disjoint and temporal transfer tests, performance collapses, and models transfer poorly to the independent LIAR benchmark, showing that within‑corpus scores reflect source and topic separability, not truth verification.
whyItMatters:"The study demonstrates that current high accuracy metrics on this fake‑news dataset are misleading, highlighting the need for more robust evaluation protocols that guard against shortcut learning."
By Yuvraj Verma
arXiv:2606.17467v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Prompt injection defenses evaluated on synthetic benchmarks do not generalize to real enterprise documents, which are longer, denser, and int...
By Aaditya Pai
arXiv:2609.24219v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Traditionally, the reliability of news publishers is assessed by expert organisations that evaluate editorial practices, transparency and factual stand...
By John Bianchi, Manuel Pratelli, Fabio Pinelli, Marinella Petrocchi
arXiv:2608. 00144v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Membership inference (MIA) on language models is usually summarised by aggregate ROC-AUC, but such evaluations are confounded: model-free blind baselines can separate members from non-members using surface text alone.
By Victor Maricato
arXiv:2608. 00144v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Membership inference (MIA) on language models is usually summarised by an aggregate ROC-AUC, but such evaluations are confounded: model-free blind baselines separate members from non-members from surface text alone.
By Victor Maricato
arXiv:2607. 28862v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to significant advances across a wide range of language tasks, while simultaneously raising growing concerns about unauthorized data exploitation and privacy leakage.
By Chengshuai Zhao, Pingchuan Ma, Dawei Li, Bohan Jiang, Zhiyuan Yu, Zhen Tan, Huan Liu