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SubscribeClaim Extraction for Fact-Checking: Data, Models, and Automated Metrics
In this paper, we explore the problem of Claim Extraction using one-to-many text generation methods, comparing LLMs, small summarization models finetuned for the task, and a previous NER-centric baseline QACG. As the current publications on Claim Extraction, Fact Extraction, Claim Generation and Check-worthy Claim Detection are quite scattered in their means and terminology, we compile their common objectives, releasing the FEVERFact dataset, with 17K atomic factual claims extracted from 4K contextualised Wikipedia sentences, adapted from the original FEVER. We compile the known objectives into an Evaluation framework of: Atomicity, Fluency, Decontextualization, Faithfulness checked for each generated claim separately, and Focus and Coverage measured against the full set of predicted claims for a single input. For each metric, we implement a scale using a reduction to an already-explored NLP task. We validate our metrics against human grading of generic claims, to see that the model ranking on F_{fact}, our hardest metric, did not change and the evaluation framework approximates human grading very closely in terms of F_1 and RMSE.
Pipeline and Dataset Generation for Automated Fact-checking in Almost Any Language
This article presents a pipeline for automated fact-checking leveraging publicly available Language Models and data. The objective is to assess the accuracy of textual claims using evidence from a ground-truth evidence corpus. The pipeline consists of two main modules -- the evidence retrieval and the claim veracity evaluation. Our primary focus is on the ease of deployment in various languages that remain unexplored in the field of automated fact-checking. Unlike most similar pipelines, which work with evidence sentences, our pipeline processes data on a paragraph level, simplifying the overall architecture and data requirements. Given the high cost of annotating language-specific fact-checking training data, our solution builds on the Question Answering for Claim Generation (QACG) method, which we adapt and use to generate the data for all models of the pipeline. Our strategy enables the introduction of new languages through machine translation of only two fixed datasets of moderate size. Subsequently, any number of training samples can be generated based on an evidence corpus in the target language. We provide open access to all data and fine-tuned models for Czech, English, Polish, and Slovak pipelines, as well as to our codebase that may be used to reproduce the results.We comprehensively evaluate the pipelines for all four languages, including human annotations and per-sample difficulty assessment using Pointwise V-information. The presented experiments are based on full Wikipedia snapshots to promote reproducibility. To facilitate implementation and user interaction, we develop the FactSearch application featuring the proposed pipeline and the preliminary feedback on its performance.
Towards Better Evaluation for Generated Patent Claims
Patent claims define the scope of protection and establish the legal boundaries of an invention. Drafting these claims is a complex and time-consuming process that usually requires the expertise of skilled patent attorneys, which can form a large access barrier for many small enterprises. To solve these challenges, researchers have investigated the use of large language models (LLMs) for automating patent claim generation. However, existing studies highlight inconsistencies between automated evaluation metrics and human expert assessments. To bridge this gap, we introduce Patent-CE, the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating patent claims. Patent-CE includes comparative claim evaluations annotated by patent experts, focusing on five key criteria: feature completeness, conceptual clarity, terminology consistency, logical linkage, and overall quality. Additionally, we propose PatClaimEval, a novel multi-dimensional evaluation method specifically designed for patent claims. Our experiments demonstrate that PatClaimEval achieves the highest correlation with human expert evaluations across all assessment criteria among all tested metrics. This research provides the groundwork for more accurate evaluations of automated patent claim generation systems.
Can Large Language Models Generate High-quality Patent Claims?
Large language models (LLMs) have shown exceptional performance across various text generation tasks but remain under-explored in the patent domain, which offers highly structured and precise language. This paper constructs a dataset to investigate the performance of current LLMs in patent claim generation. Our results demonstrate that generating claims based on patent descriptions outperforms previous research relying on abstracts. Interestingly, current patent-specific LLMs perform much worse than state-of-the-art general LLMs, highlighting the necessity for future research on in-domain LLMs. We also find that LLMs can produce high-quality first independent claims, but their performances markedly decrease for subsequent dependent claims. Moreover, fine-tuning can enhance the completeness of inventions' features, conceptual clarity, and feature linkage. Among the tested LLMs, GPT-4 demonstrates the best performance in comprehensive human evaluations by patent experts, with better feature coverage, conceptual clarity, and technical coherence. Despite these capabilities, comprehensive revision and modification are still necessary to pass rigorous patent scrutiny and ensure legal robustness.
Woodpecker: Hallucination Correction for Multimodal Large Language Models
Hallucination is a big shadow hanging over the rapidly evolving Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), referring to the phenomenon that the generated text is inconsistent with the image content. In order to mitigate hallucinations, existing studies mainly resort to an instruction-tuning manner that requires retraining the models with specific data. In this paper, we pave a different way, introducing a training-free method named Woodpecker. Like a woodpecker heals trees, it picks out and corrects hallucinations from the generated text. Concretely, Woodpecker consists of five stages: key concept extraction, question formulation, visual knowledge validation, visual claim generation, and hallucination correction. Implemented in a post-remedy manner, Woodpecker can easily serve different MLLMs, while being interpretable by accessing intermediate outputs of the five stages. We evaluate Woodpecker both quantitatively and qualitatively and show the huge potential of this new paradigm. On the POPE benchmark, our method obtains a 30.66%/24.33% improvement in accuracy over the baseline MiniGPT-4/mPLUG-Owl. The source code is released at https://github.com/BradyFU/Woodpecker.
JointCQ: Improving Factual Hallucination Detection with Joint Claim and Query Generation
Current large language models (LLMs) often suffer from hallucination issues, i,e, generating content that appears factual but is actually unreliable. A typical hallucination detection pipeline involves response decomposition (i.e., claim extraction), query generation, evidence collection (i.e., search or retrieval), and claim verification. However, existing methods exhibit limitations in the first two stages, such as context loss during claim extraction and low specificity in query generation, resulting in degraded performance across the hallucination detection pipeline. In this work, we introduce JointCQ https://github.com/pku0xff/JointCQ, a joint claim-and-query generation framework designed to construct an effective and efficient claim-query generator. Our framework leverages elaborately designed evaluation criteria to filter synthesized training data, and finetunes a language model for joint claim extraction and query generation, providing reliable and informative inputs for downstream search and verification. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms previous methods on multiple open-domain QA hallucination detection benchmarks, advancing the goal of more trustworthy and transparent language model systems.
SeQwen at the Financial Misinformation Detection Challenge Task: Sequential Learning for Claim Verification and Explanation Generation in Financial Domains
This paper presents the system description of our entry for the COLING 2025 FMD challenge, focusing on misinformation detection in financial domains. We experimented with a combination of large language models, including Qwen, Mistral, and Gemma-2, and leveraged pre-processing and sequential learning for not only identifying fraudulent financial content but also generating coherent, and concise explanations that clarify the rationale behind the classifications. Our approach achieved competitive results with an F1-score of 0.8283 for classification, and ROUGE-1 of 0.7253 for explanations. This work highlights the transformative potential of LLMs in financial applications, offering insights into their capabilities for combating misinformation and enhancing transparency while identifying areas for future improvement in robustness and domain adaptation.
Natural Language Generation from Visual Events: Challenges and Future Directions
The ability to use natural language to talk about visual events is at the core of human intelligence and a crucial feature of any artificial intelligence system. In recent years, a substantial body of work in visually grounded NLP has focused on describing content depicted in single images. By contrast, comparatively less attention has been devoted to exhaustively modeling scenarios in which natural language is employed to interpret and talk about events presented through videos or sequences of images. In this position paper, we argue that any NLG task dealing with sequences of images or frames is an instance of the broader, more general problem of modeling the intricate relationships between visual events unfolding over time and the features of the language used to interpret, describe, or narrate them. Therefore, solving these tasks requires models to be capable of identifying and managing such intricacies. We consider five seemingly different tasks, which we argue are compelling instances of this broader multimodal problem. Consistently, we claim that these tasks pose a common set of challenges and share similarities in terms of modeling and evaluation approaches. Building on this perspective, we identify key open questions and propose several research directions for future investigation. We claim that improving language-and-vision models' understanding of visual events is both timely and essential, given their growing applications. Additionally, this challenge offers significant scientific insight, advancing model development through principles of human cognition and language use.
Varifocal Question Generation for Fact-checking
Fact-checking requires retrieving evidence related to a claim under investigation. The task can be formulated as question generation based on a claim, followed by question answering. However, recent question generation approaches assume that the answer is known and typically contained in a passage given as input, whereas such passages are what is being sought when verifying a claim. In this paper, we present {\it Varifocal}, a method that generates questions based on different focal points within a given claim, i.e.\ different spans of the claim and its metadata, such as its source and date. Our method outperforms previous work on a fact-checking question generation dataset on a wide range of automatic evaluation metrics. These results are corroborated by our manual evaluation, which indicates that our method generates more relevant and informative questions. We further demonstrate the potential of focal points in generating sets of clarification questions for product descriptions.
Perceptually Accurate 3D Talking Head Generation: New Definitions, Speech-Mesh Representation, and Evaluation Metrics
Recent advancements in speech-driven 3D talking head generation have made significant progress in lip synchronization. However, existing models still struggle to capture the perceptual alignment between varying speech characteristics and corresponding lip movements. In this work, we claim that three criteria -- Temporal Synchronization, Lip Readability, and Expressiveness -- are crucial for achieving perceptually accurate lip movements. Motivated by our hypothesis that a desirable representation space exists to meet these three criteria, we introduce a speech-mesh synchronized representation that captures intricate correspondences between speech signals and 3D face meshes. We found that our learned representation exhibits desirable characteristics, and we plug it into existing models as a perceptual loss to better align lip movements to the given speech. In addition, we utilize this representation as a perceptual metric and introduce two other physically grounded lip synchronization metrics to assess how well the generated 3D talking heads align with these three criteria. Experiments show that training 3D talking head generation models with our perceptual loss significantly improve all three aspects of perceptually accurate lip synchronization. Codes and datasets are available at https://perceptual-3d-talking-head.github.io/.
Unconditional Priors Matter! Improving Conditional Generation of Fine-Tuned Diffusion Models
Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) is a fundamental technique in training conditional diffusion models. The common practice for CFG-based training is to use a single network to learn both conditional and unconditional noise prediction, with a small dropout rate for conditioning. However, we observe that the joint learning of unconditional noise with limited bandwidth in training results in poor priors for the unconditional case. More importantly, these poor unconditional noise predictions become a serious reason for degrading the quality of conditional generation. Inspired by the fact that most CFG-based conditional models are trained by fine-tuning a base model with better unconditional generation, we first show that simply replacing the unconditional noise in CFG with that predicted by the base model can significantly improve conditional generation. Furthermore, we show that a diffusion model other than the one the fine-tuned model was trained on can be used for unconditional noise replacement. We experimentally verify our claim with a range of CFG-based conditional models for both image and video generation, including Zero-1-to-3, Versatile Diffusion, DiT, DynamiCrafter, and InstructPix2Pix.
SciVer: Evaluating Foundation Models for Multimodal Scientific Claim Verification
We introduce SciVer, the first benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the ability of foundation models to verify claims within a multimodal scientific context. SciVer consists of 3,000 expert-annotated examples over 1,113 scientific papers, covering four subsets, each representing a common reasoning type in multimodal scientific claim verification. To enable fine-grained evaluation, each example includes expert-annotated supporting evidence. We assess the performance of 21 state-of-the-art multimodal foundation models, including o4-mini, Gemini-2.5-Flash, Llama-3.2-Vision, and Qwen2.5-VL. Our experiment reveals a substantial performance gap between these models and human experts on SciVer. Through an in-depth analysis of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and human-conducted error evaluations, we identify critical limitations in current open-source models, offering key insights to advance models' comprehension and reasoning in multimodal scientific literature tasks.
Retrieval Augmented Structured Generation: Business Document Information Extraction As Tool Use
Business Document Information Extraction (BDIE) is the problem of transforming a blob of unstructured information (raw text, scanned documents, etc.) into a structured format that downstream systems can parse and use. It has two main tasks: Key-Information Extraction (KIE) and Line Items Recognition (LIR). In this paper, we argue that BDIE is best modeled as a Tool Use problem, where the tools are these downstream systems. We then present Retrieval Augmented Structured Generation (RASG), a novel general framework for BDIE that achieves state of the art (SOTA) results on both KIE and LIR tasks on BDIE benchmarks. The contributions of this paper are threefold: (1) We show, with ablation benchmarks, that Large Language Models (LLMs) with RASG are already competitive with or surpasses current SOTA Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) without RASG on BDIE benchmarks. (2) We propose a new metric class for Line Items Recognition, General Line Items Recognition Metric (GLIRM), that is more aligned with practical BDIE use cases compared to existing metrics, such as ANLS*, DocILE, and GriTS. (3) We provide a heuristic algorithm for backcalculating bounding boxes of predicted line items and tables without the need for vision encoders. Finally, we claim that, while LMMs might sometimes offer marginal performance benefits, LLMs + RASG is oftentimes superior given real-world applications and constraints of BDIE.
HalluGuard: Evidence-Grounded Small Reasoning Models to Mitigate Hallucinations in Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in many NLP tasks but remain prone to hallucinations, limiting trust in real-world applications. We present HalluGuard, a 4B-parameter Small Reasoning Model (SRM) for mitigating hallucinations in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). HalluGuard classifies document-claim pairs as grounded or hallucinated and produces evidence-grounded justifications for transparency. Our approach combines (i) a domain-agnostic synthetic dataset derived from FineWeb and refined through multi-stage curation and data reformation, (ii) synthetic grounded and hallucinated claims, and (iii) preference-based fine-tuning with Odds Ratio Preference Optimization to distill large-model reasoning into a smaller backbone. On the RAGTruth subset of the LLM-AggreFact benchmark, HalluGuard achieves 84.0% balanced accuracy (BAcc), rivaling specialized models, MiniCheck (7B; 84.0%) and Granite Guardian 3.3 (8B; 82.2%) while using roughly half their parameters. Over the full benchmark it reaches 75.7% BAcc, matching larger general-purpose LLMs such as GPT-4o (75.9%). We will release HalluGuard and datasets under Apache 2.0 upon acceptance.
CLIPPER: Compression enables long-context synthetic data generation
LLM developers are increasingly reliant on synthetic data, but generating high-quality data for complex long-context reasoning tasks remains challenging. We introduce CLIPPER, a compression-based approach for generating synthetic data tailored to narrative claim verification - a task that requires reasoning over a book to verify a given claim. Instead of generating claims directly from the raw text of the book, which results in artifact-riddled claims, CLIPPER first compresses the book into chapter outlines and book summaries and then uses these intermediate representations to generate complex claims and corresponding chain-of-thoughts. Compared to naive approaches, CLIPPER produces claims that are more valid, grounded, and complex. Using CLIPPER, we construct a dataset of 19K synthetic book claims paired with their source texts and chain-of-thought reasoning, and use it to fine-tune three open-weight models. Our best model achieves breakthrough results on narrative claim verification (from 28% to 76% accuracy on our test set) and sets a new state-of-the-art for sub-10B models on the NoCha leaderboard. Further analysis shows that our models generate more detailed and grounded chain-of-thought reasoning while also improving performance on other narrative understanding tasks (e.g., NarrativeQA).
MUCH: A Multilingual Claim Hallucination Benchmark
Claim-level Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) is a promising approach to mitigate the lack of reliability in Large Language Models (LLMs). We introduce MUCH, the first claim-level UQ benchmark designed for fair and reproducible evaluation of future methods under realistic conditions. It includes 4,873 samples across four European languages (English, French, Spanish, and German) and four instruction-tuned open-weight LLMs. Unlike prior claim-level benchmarks, we release 24 generation logits per token, facilitating the development of future white-box methods without re-generating data. Moreover, in contrast to previous benchmarks that rely on manual or LLM-based segmentation, we propose a new deterministic algorithm capable of segmenting claims using as little as 0.2% of the LLM generation time. This makes our segmentation approach suitable for real-time monitoring of LLM outputs, ensuring that MUCH evaluates UQ methods under realistic deployment constraints. Finally, our evaluations show that current methods still have substantial room for improvement in both performance and efficiency.
Vision Relation Transformer for Unbiased Scene Graph Generation
Recent years have seen a growing interest in Scene Graph Generation (SGG), a comprehensive visual scene understanding task that aims to predict entity relationships using a relation encoder-decoder pipeline stacked on top of an object encoder-decoder backbone. Unfortunately, current SGG methods suffer from an information loss regarding the entities local-level cues during the relation encoding process. To mitigate this, we introduce the Vision rElation TransfOrmer (VETO), consisting of a novel local-level entity relation encoder. We further observe that many existing SGG methods claim to be unbiased, but are still biased towards either head or tail classes. To overcome this bias, we introduce a Mutually Exclusive ExperT (MEET) learning strategy that captures important relation features without bias towards head or tail classes. Experimental results on the VG and GQA datasets demonstrate that VETO + MEET boosts the predictive performance by up to 47 percentage over the state of the art while being 10 times smaller.
Prototype-based Embedding Network for Scene Graph Generation
Current Scene Graph Generation (SGG) methods explore contextual information to predict relationships among entity pairs. However, due to the diverse visual appearance of numerous possible subject-object combinations, there is a large intra-class variation within each predicate category, e.g., "man-eating-pizza, giraffe-eating-leaf", and the severe inter-class similarity between different classes, e.g., "man-holding-plate, man-eating-pizza", in model's latent space. The above challenges prevent current SGG methods from acquiring robust features for reliable relation prediction. In this paper, we claim that the predicate's category-inherent semantics can serve as class-wise prototypes in the semantic space for relieving the challenges. To the end, we propose the Prototype-based Embedding Network (PE-Net), which models entities/predicates with prototype-aligned compact and distinctive representations and thereby establishes matching between entity pairs and predicates in a common embedding space for relation recognition. Moreover, Prototype-guided Learning (PL) is introduced to help PE-Net efficiently learn such entitypredicate matching, and Prototype Regularization (PR) is devised to relieve the ambiguous entity-predicate matching caused by the predicate's semantic overlap. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method gains superior relation recognition capability on SGG, achieving new state-of-the-art performances on both Visual Genome and Open Images datasets.
A Reality Check on Context Utilisation for Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) helps address the limitations of the parametric knowledge embedded within a language model (LM). However, investigations of how LMs utilise retrieved information of varying complexity in real-world scenarios have been limited to synthetic contexts. We introduce DRUID (Dataset of Retrieved Unreliable, Insufficient and Difficult-to-understand contexts) with real-world queries and contexts manually annotated for stance. The dataset is based on the prototypical task of automated claim verification, for which automated retrieval of real-world evidence is crucial. We compare DRUID to synthetic datasets (CounterFact, ConflictQA) and find that artificial datasets often fail to represent the complex and diverse real-world context settings. We show that synthetic datasets exaggerate context characteristics rare in real retrieved data, which leads to inflated context utilisation results, as measured by our novel ACU score. Moreover, while previous work has mainly focused on singleton context characteristics to explain context utilisation, correlations between singleton context properties and ACU on DRUID are surprisingly small compared to other properties related to context source. Overall, our work underscores the need for real-world aligned context utilisation studies to represent and improve performance in real-world RAG settings.
Beyond Translation: LLM-Based Data Generation for Multilingual Fact-Checking
Robust automatic fact-checking systems have the potential to combat online misinformation at scale. However, most existing research primarily focuses on English. In this paper, we introduce MultiSynFact, the first large-scale multilingual fact-checking dataset containing 2.2M claim-source pairs designed to support Spanish, German, English, and other low-resource languages. Our dataset generation pipeline leverages Large Language Models (LLMs), integrating external knowledge from Wikipedia and incorporating rigorous claim validation steps to ensure data quality. We evaluate the effectiveness of MultiSynFact across multiple models and experimental settings. Additionally, we open-source a user-friendly framework to facilitate further research in multilingual fact-checking and dataset generation.
MolDiff: Addressing the Atom-Bond Inconsistency Problem in 3D Molecule Diffusion Generation
Deep generative models have recently achieved superior performance in 3D molecule generation. Most of them first generate atoms and then add chemical bonds based on the generated atoms in a post-processing manner. However, there might be no corresponding bond solution for the temporally generated atoms as their locations are generated without considering potential bonds. We define this problem as the atom-bond inconsistency problem and claim it is the main reason for current approaches to generating unrealistic 3D molecules. To overcome this problem, we propose a new diffusion model called MolDiff which can generate atoms and bonds simultaneously while still maintaining their consistency by explicitly modeling the dependence between their relationships. We evaluated the generation ability of our proposed model and the quality of the generated molecules using criteria related to both geometry and chemical properties. The empirical studies showed that our model outperforms previous approaches, achieving a three-fold improvement in success rate and generating molecules with significantly better quality.
Embedding Trust: Semantic Isotropy Predicts Nonfactuality in Long-Form Text Generation
To deploy large language models (LLMs) in high-stakes application domains that require substantively accurate responses to open-ended prompts, we need reliable, computationally inexpensive methods that assess the trustworthiness of long-form responses generated by LLMs. However, existing approaches often rely on claim-by-claim fact-checking, which is computationally expensive and brittle in long-form responses to open-ended prompts. In this work, we introduce semantic isotropy -- the degree of uniformity across normalized text embeddings on the unit sphere -- and use it to assess the trustworthiness of long-form responses generated by LLMs. To do so, we generate several long-form responses, embed them, and estimate the level of semantic isotropy of these responses as the angular dispersion of the embeddings on the unit sphere. We find that higher semantic isotropy -- that is, greater embedding dispersion -- reliably signals lower factual consistency across samples. Our approach requires no labeled data, no fine-tuning, and no hyperparameter selection, and can be used with open- or closed-weight embedding models. Across multiple domains, our method consistently outperforms existing approaches in predicting nonfactuality in long-form responses using only a handful of samples -- offering a practical, low-cost approach for integrating trust assessment into real-world LLM workflows.
LongProc: Benchmarking Long-Context Language Models on Long Procedural Generation
Existing benchmarks for evaluating long-context language models (LCLMs) primarily focus on long-context recall, requiring models to produce short responses based on a few critical snippets while processing thousands of irrelevant tokens. We introduce LongProc (Long Procedural Generation), a new benchmark that requires both the integration of highly dispersed information and long-form generation. LongProc consists of six diverse procedural generation tasks, such as extracting structured information from HTML pages into a TSV format and executing complex search procedures to create travel plans. These tasks challenge LCLMs by testing their ability to follow detailed procedural instructions, synthesize and reason over dispersed information, and generate structured, long-form outputs (up to 8K tokens). Furthermore, as these tasks adhere to deterministic procedures and yield structured outputs, they enable reliable rule-based evaluation. We evaluate 17 LCLMs on LongProc across three difficulty levels, with maximum numbers of output tokens set at 500, 2K, and 8K. Notably, while all tested models claim a context window size above 32K tokens, open-weight models typically falter on 2K-token tasks, and closed-source models like GPT-4o show significant degradation on 8K-token tasks. Further analysis reveals that LCLMs struggle to maintain long-range coherence in long-form generations. These findings highlight critical limitations in current LCLMs and suggest substantial room for improvement. Data and code available at: https://princeton-pli.github.io/LongProc
Information Extraction from Heterogeneous Documents without Ground Truth Labels using Synthetic Label Generation and Knowledge Distillation
Invoices and receipts submitted by employees are visually rich documents (VRDs) with textual, visual and layout information. To protect against the risk of fraud and abuse, it is crucial for organizations to efficiently extract desired information from submitted receipts. This helps in the assessment of key factors such as appropriateness of the expense claim, adherence to spending and transaction policies, the validity of the receipt, as well as downstream anomaly detection at various levels. These documents are heterogeneous, with multiple formats and languages, uploaded with different image qualities, and often do not contain ground truth labels for the efficient training of models. In this paper we propose Task Aware Instruction-based Labelling (TAIL), a method for synthetic label generation in VRD corpuses without labels, and fine-tune a multimodal Visually Rich Document Understanding Model (VRDU) on TAIL labels using response-based knowledge distillation without using the teacher model's weights or training dataset to conditionally generate annotations in the appropriate format. Using a benchmark external dataset where ground truth labels are available, we demonstrate conditions under which our approach performs at par with Claude 3 Sonnet through empirical studies. We then show that the resulting model performs at par or better on the internal expense documents of a large multinational organization than state-of-the-art LMM (large multimodal model) Claude 3 Sonnet while being 85% less costly and ~5X faster, and outperforms layout-aware baselines by more than 10% in Average Normalized Levenshtein Similarity (ANLS) scores due to its ability to reason and extract information from rare formats. Finally, we illustrate the usage of our approach in overpayment prevention.
Out of the BLEU: how should we assess quality of the Code Generation models?
In recent years, researchers have created and introduced a significant number of various code generation models. As human evaluation of every new model version is unfeasible, the community adopted automatic evaluation metrics such as BLEU to approximate the results of human judgement. These metrics originate from the machine translation domain and it is unclear whether they are applicable for the code generation tasks and how well they agree with the human evaluation on this task. There are also other metrics, CodeBLEU and RUBY, developed to estimate the similarity of code, that take into account the properties of source code. However, for these metrics there are hardly any studies on their agreement with the human evaluation. Despite all that, minimal differences in the metric scores have been used in recent papers to claim superiority of some code generation models over the others. In this paper, we present a study on the applicability of six metrics -- BLEU, ROUGE-L, METEOR, ChrF, CodeBLEU, and RUBY -- for evaluation of code generation models. We conduct a study on two different code generation datasets and use human annotators to assess the quality of all models run on these datasets. The results indicate that for the CoNaLa dataset of Python one-liners, none of the metrics can correctly emulate human judgement on which model is better with >95% certainty if the difference in model scores is less than 5 points. For the HearthStone dataset, which consists of classes of a particular structure, a difference in model scores of at least 2 points is enough to claim the superiority of one model over the other. Our findings suggest that the ChrF metric is a better fit for the evaluation of code generation models than the commonly used BLEU and CodeBLEU. Yet, finding a metric for code generation that closely agrees with humans requires additional work.
SQuAI: Scientific Question-Answering with Multi-Agent Retrieval-Augmented Generation
We present SQuAI (https://squai.scads.ai/), a scalable and trustworthy multi-agent retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework for scientific question answering (QA) with large language models (LLMs). SQuAI addresses key limitations of existing RAG systems in the scholarly domain, where complex, open-domain questions demand accurate answers, explicit claims with citations, and retrieval across millions of scientific documents. Built on over 2.3 million full-text papers from arXiv.org, SQuAI employs four collaborative agents to decompose complex questions into sub-questions, retrieve targeted evidence via hybrid sparse-dense retrieval, and adaptively filter documents to improve contextual relevance. To ensure faithfulness and traceability, SQuAI integrates in-line citations for each generated claim and provides supporting sentences from the source documents. Our system improves faithfulness, answer relevance, and contextual relevance by up to +0.088 (12%) over a strong RAG baseline. We further release a benchmark of 1,000 scientific question-answer-evidence triplets to support reproducibility. With transparent reasoning, verifiable citations, and domain-wide scalability, SQuAI demonstrates how multi-agent RAG enables more trustworthy scientific QA with LLMs.
Big data analysis and distributed deep learning for next-generation intrusion detection system optimization
With the growing use of information technology in all life domains, hacking has become more negatively effective than ever before. Also with developing technologies, attacks numbers are growing exponentially every few months and become more sophisticated so that traditional IDS becomes inefficient detecting them. This paper proposes a solution to detect not only new threats with higher detection rate and lower false positive than already used IDS, but also it could detect collective and contextual security attacks. We achieve those results by using Networking Chatbot, a deep recurrent neural network: Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) on top of Apache Spark Framework that has an input of flow traffic and traffic aggregation and the output is a language of two words, normal or abnormal. We propose merging the concepts of language processing, contextual analysis, distributed deep learning, big data, anomaly detection of flow analysis. We propose a model that describes the network abstract normal behavior from a sequence of millions of packets within their context and analyzes them in near real-time to detect point, collective and contextual anomalies. Experiments are done on MAWI dataset, and it shows better detection rate not only than signature IDS, but also better than traditional anomaly IDS. The experiment shows lower false positive, higher detection rate and better point anomalies detection. As for prove of contextual and collective anomalies detection, we discuss our claim and the reason behind our hypothesis. But the experiment is done on random small subsets of the dataset because of hardware limitations, so we share experiment and our future vision thoughts as we wish that full prove will be done in future by other interested researchers who have better hardware infrastructure than ours.
Beyond Factual Accuracy: Evaluating Coverage of Diverse Factual Information in Long-form Text Generation
This paper presents ICAT, an evaluation framework for measuring coverage of diverse factual information in long-form text generation. ICAT breaks down a long output text into a list of atomic claims and not only verifies each claim through retrieval from a (reliable) knowledge source, but also computes the alignment between the atomic factual claims and various aspects expected to be presented in the output. We study three implementations of the ICAT framework, each with a different assumption on the availability of aspects and alignment method. By adopting data from the diversification task in the TREC Web Track and the ClueWeb corpus, we evaluate the ICAT framework. We demonstrate strong correlation with human judgments and provide comprehensive evaluation across multiple state-of-the-art LLMs. Our framework further offers interpretable and fine-grained analysis of diversity and coverage. Its modular design allows for easy adaptation to different domains and datasets, making it a valuable tool for evaluating the qualitative aspects of long-form responses produced by LLMs.
Real-Time Detection of Hallucinated Entities in Long-Form Generation
Large language models are now routinely used in high-stakes applications where hallucinations can cause serious harm, such as medical consultations or legal advice. Existing hallucination detection methods, however, are impractical for real-world use, as they are either limited to short factual queries or require costly external verification. We present a cheap, scalable method for real-time identification of hallucinated tokens in long-form generations, and scale it effectively to 70B parameter models. Our approach targets entity-level hallucinations -- e.g., fabricated names, dates, citations -- rather than claim-level, thereby naturally mapping to token-level labels and enabling streaming detection. We develop an annotation methodology that leverages web search to annotate model responses with grounded labels indicating which tokens correspond to fabricated entities. This dataset enables us to train effective hallucination classifiers with simple and efficient methods such as linear probes. Evaluating across four model families, our classifiers consistently outperform baselines on long-form responses, including more expensive methods such as semantic entropy (e.g., AUC 0.90 vs 0.71 for Llama-3.3-70B), and are also an improvement in short-form question-answering settings. Moreover, despite being trained only with entity-level labels, our probes effectively detect incorrect answers in mathematical reasoning tasks, indicating generalization beyond entities. While our annotation methodology is expensive, we find that annotated responses from one model can be used to train effective classifiers on other models; accordingly, we publicly release our datasets to facilitate reuse. Overall, our work suggests a promising new approach for scalable, real-world hallucination detection.
Fin-Fact: A Benchmark Dataset for Multimodal Financial Fact Checking and Explanation Generation
Fact-checking in financial domain is under explored, and there is a shortage of quality dataset in this domain. In this paper, we propose Fin-Fact, a benchmark dataset for multimodal fact-checking within the financial domain. Notably, it includes professional fact-checker annotations and justifications, providing expertise and credibility. With its multimodal nature encompassing both textual and visual content, Fin-Fact provides complementary information sources to enhance factuality analysis. Its primary objective is combating misinformation in finance, fostering transparency, and building trust in financial reporting and news dissemination. By offering insightful explanations, Fin-Fact empowers users, including domain experts and end-users, to understand the reasoning behind fact-checking decisions, validating claim credibility, and fostering trust in the fact-checking process. The Fin-Fact dataset, along with our experimental codes is available at https://github.com/IIT-DM/Fin-Fact/.
MedScore: Generalizable Factuality Evaluation of Free-Form Medical Answers by Domain-adapted Claim Decomposition and Verification
While Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate fluent and convincing responses, they are not necessarily correct. This is especially apparent in the popular decompose-then-verify factuality evaluation pipeline, where LLMs evaluate generations by decomposing the generations into individual, valid claims. Factuality evaluation is especially important for medical answers, since incorrect medical information could seriously harm the patient. However, existing factuality systems are a poor match for the medical domain, as they are typically only evaluated on objective, entity-centric, formulaic texts such as biographies and historical topics. This differs from condition-dependent, conversational, hypothetical, sentence-structure diverse, and subjective medical answers, which makes decomposition into valid facts challenging. We propose MedScore, a new pipeline to decompose medical answers into condition-aware valid facts and verify against in-domain corpora. Our method extracts up to three times more valid facts than existing methods, reducing hallucination and vague references, and retaining condition-dependency in facts. The resulting factuality score substantially varies by decomposition method, verification corpus, and used backbone LLM, highlighting the importance of customizing each step for reliable factuality evaluation by using our generalizable and modularized pipeline for domain adaptation.
Can AI Validate Science? Benchmarking LLMs for Accurate Scientific Claim $\rightarrow$ Evidence Reasoning
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being used for complex research tasks such as literature review, idea generation, and scientific paper analysis, yet their ability to truly understand and process the intricate relationships within complex research papers, such as the logical links between claims and supporting evidence remains largely unexplored. In this study, we present CLAIM-BENCH, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating LLMs' capabilities in scientific claim-evidence extraction and validation, a task that reflects deeper comprehension of scientific argumentation. We systematically compare three approaches which are inspired by divide and conquer approaches, across six diverse LLMs, highlighting model-specific strengths and weaknesses in scientific comprehension. Through evaluation involving over 300 claim-evidence pairs across multiple research domains, we reveal significant limitations in LLMs' ability to process complex scientific content. Our results demonstrate that closed-source models like GPT-4 and Claude consistently outperform open-source counterparts in precision and recall across claim-evidence identification tasks. Furthermore, strategically designed three-pass and one-by-one prompting approaches significantly improve LLMs' abilities to accurately link dispersed evidence with claims, although this comes at increased computational cost. CLAIM-BENCH sets a new standard for evaluating scientific comprehension in LLMs, offering both a diagnostic tool and a path forward for building systems capable of deeper, more reliable reasoning across full-length papers.
Is Temperature the Creativity Parameter of Large Language Models?
Large language models (LLMs) are applied to all sorts of creative tasks, and their outputs vary from beautiful, to peculiar, to pastiche, into plain plagiarism. The temperature parameter of an LLM regulates the amount of randomness, leading to more diverse outputs; therefore, it is often claimed to be the creativity parameter. Here, we investigate this claim using a narrative generation task with a predetermined fixed context, model and prompt. Specifically, we present an empirical analysis of the LLM output for different temperature values using four necessary conditions for creativity in narrative generation: novelty, typicality, cohesion, and coherence. We find that temperature is weakly correlated with novelty, and unsurprisingly, moderately correlated with incoherence, but there is no relationship with either cohesion or typicality. However, the influence of temperature on creativity is far more nuanced and weak than suggested by the "creativity parameter" claim; overall results suggest that the LLM generates slightly more novel outputs as temperatures get higher. Finally, we discuss ideas to allow more controlled LLM creativity, rather than relying on chance via changing the temperature parameter.
Beyond True or False: Retrieval-Augmented Hierarchical Analysis of Nuanced Claims
Claims made by individuals or entities are oftentimes nuanced and cannot be clearly labeled as entirely "true" or "false" -- as is frequently the case with scientific and political claims. However, a claim (e.g., "vaccine A is better than vaccine B") can be dissected into its integral aspects and sub-aspects (e.g., efficacy, safety, distribution), which are individually easier to validate. This enables a more comprehensive, structured response that provides a well-rounded perspective on a given problem while also allowing the reader to prioritize specific angles of interest within the claim (e.g., safety towards children). Thus, we propose ClaimSpect, a retrieval-augmented generation-based framework for automatically constructing a hierarchy of aspects typically considered when addressing a claim and enriching them with corpus-specific perspectives. This structure hierarchically partitions an input corpus to retrieve relevant segments, which assist in discovering new sub-aspects. Moreover, these segments enable the discovery of varying perspectives towards an aspect of the claim (e.g., support, neutral, or oppose) and their respective prevalence (e.g., "how many biomedical papers believe vaccine A is more transportable than B?"). We apply ClaimSpect to a wide variety of real-world scientific and political claims featured in our constructed dataset, showcasing its robustness and accuracy in deconstructing a nuanced claim and representing perspectives within a corpus. Through real-world case studies and human evaluation, we validate its effectiveness over multiple baselines.
EX-FEVER: A Dataset for Multi-hop Explainable Fact Verification
Fact verification aims to automatically probe the veracity of a claim based on several pieces of evidence. Existing works are always engaging in the accuracy improvement, let alone the explainability, a critical capability of fact verification system. Constructing an explainable fact verification system in a complex multi-hop scenario is consistently impeded by the absence of a relevant high-quality dataset. Previous dataset either suffer from excessive simplification or fail to incorporate essential considerations for explainability. To address this, we present EX-FEVER, a pioneering dataset for multi-hop explainable fact verification. With over 60,000 claims involving 2-hop and 3-hop reasoning, each is created by summarizing and modifying information from hyperlinked Wikipedia documents. Each instance is accompanied by a veracity label and an explanation that outlines the reasoning path supporting the veracity classification. Additionally, we demonstrate a novel baseline system on our EX-FEVER dataset, showcasing document retrieval, explanation generation, and claim verification and observe that existing fact verification models trained on previous datasets struggle to perform well on our dataset. Furthermore, we highlight the potential of utilizing Large Language Models in the fact verification task. We hope our dataset could make a significant contribution by providing ample opportunities to explore the integration of natural language explanations in the domain of fact verification.
DEFAME: Dynamic Evidence-based FAct-checking with Multimodal Experts
The proliferation of disinformation demands reliable and scalable fact-checking solutions. We present Dynamic Evidence-based FAct-checking with Multimodal Experts (DEFAME), a modular, zero-shot MLLM pipeline for open-domain, text-image claim verification. DEFAME operates in a six-stage process, dynamically selecting the tools and search depth to extract and evaluate textual and visual evidence. Unlike prior approaches that are text-only, lack explainability, or rely solely on parametric knowledge, DEFAME performs end-to-end verification, accounting for images in claims and evidence while generating structured, multimodal reports. Evaluation on the popular benchmarks VERITE, AVerITeC, and MOCHEG shows that DEFAME surpasses all previous methods, establishing itself as the new state-of-the-art fact-checking system for uni- and multimodal fact-checking. Moreover, we introduce a new multimodal benchmark, ClaimReview2024+, featuring claims after the knowledge cutoff of GPT-4o, avoiding data leakage. Here, DEFAME drastically outperforms the GPT-4o baselines, showing temporal generalizability and the potential for real-time fact-checking.
Get Your Vitamin C! Robust Fact Verification with Contrastive Evidence
Typical fact verification models use retrieved written evidence to verify claims. Evidence sources, however, often change over time as more information is gathered and revised. In order to adapt, models must be sensitive to subtle differences in supporting evidence. We present VitaminC, a benchmark infused with challenging cases that require fact verification models to discern and adjust to slight factual changes. We collect over 100,000 Wikipedia revisions that modify an underlying fact, and leverage these revisions, together with additional synthetically constructed ones, to create a total of over 400,000 claim-evidence pairs. Unlike previous resources, the examples in VitaminC are contrastive, i.e., they contain evidence pairs that are nearly identical in language and content, with the exception that one supports a given claim while the other does not. We show that training using this design increases robustness -- improving accuracy by 10% on adversarial fact verification and 6% on adversarial natural language inference (NLI). Moreover, the structure of VitaminC leads us to define additional tasks for fact-checking resources: tagging relevant words in the evidence for verifying the claim, identifying factual revisions, and providing automatic edits via factually consistent text generation.
