Textual claims are often accompanied by images to enhance their credibility and spread on social media, but this also raises concerns about the spread of misinformation. Existing datasets for automated verification of image-text claims remain limited, as they often consist of synthetic claims and lack evidence annotations to capture the reasoning behind the verdict. In this work, we introduce AVERIMATEC, a dataset consisting of 1,297 real-world image-text claims. Each claim is annotated with question-answer (QA) pairs containing evidence from the web, reflecting a decomposed reasoning regarding the verdict. We mitigate common challenges in fact-checking datasets such as contextual dependence, temporal leakage, and evidence insufficiency, via claim normalization, temporally constrained evidence annotation, and a two-stage sufficiency check. We assess the consistency of the annotation in AVERIMATEC via inter-annotator studies, achieving a κ = 0.742 on verdicts and 74.7% consistency on QA pairs. We also propose a novel evaluation method for evidence retrieval and conduct extensive experiments to establish baselines for verifying image-text claims using open-web evidence.

Recent advancements in multimodal out-of-context (OOC) misinformation detection have made remarkable progress in checking the consistencies between different modalities for supporting or refuting image-text pairs. However, existing OOC misinformation detection methods tend to emphasize the role of internal consistency, ignoring the significant of external consistency between image-text pairs and external evidence. In this paper, we propose HiEAG, a novel Hierarchical Evidence-Augmented Generation framework to refine external consistency checking through leveraging the extensive knowledge of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Our approach decomposes external consistency checking into a comprehensive engine pipeline, which integrates reranking and rewriting, apart from retrieval. Evidence reranking module utilizes Automatic Evidence Selection Prompting (AESP) that acquires the relevant evidence item from the products of evidence retrieval. Subsequently, evidence rewriting module leverages Automatic Evidence Generation Prompting (AEGP) to improve task adaptation on MLLM-based OOC misinformation detectors. Furthermore, our approach enables explanation for judgment, and achieves impressive performance with instruction tuning. Experimental results on different benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed HiEAG surpasses previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in the accuracy over all samples.

Textual claims are often accompanied by images to enhance their credibility and spread on social media, but this also raises concerns about the spread of misinformation. Existing datasets for automated verification of image-text claims remain limited, as they often consist of synthetic claims and lack evidence annotations to capture the reasoning behind the verdict. In this work, we introduce AVerImaTeC, a dataset consisting of 1,297 real-world image-text claims. Each claim is annotated with question-answer (QA) pairs containing evidence from the web, reflecting a decomposed reasoning regarding the verdict. We mitigate common challenges in fact-checking datasets such as contextual dependence, temporal leakage, and evidence insufficiency, via claim normalization, temporally constrained evidence annotation, and a two-stage sufficiency check. We assess the consistency of the annotation in AVerImaTeC via inter-annotator studies, achieving a $κ=0.742$ on verdicts and $74.7\%$ consistency on QA pairs. We also propose a novel evaluation method for evidence retrieval and conduct extensive experiments to establish baselines for verifying image-text claims using open-web evidence.

We present M-Reason, a demonstration system for transparent, agent-based reasoning and evidence integration in the biomedical domain, with a focus on cancer research. M-Reason leverages recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and modular agent orchestration to automate evidence retrieval, appraisal, and synthesis across diverse biomedical data sources. Each agent specializes in a specific evidence stream, enabling parallel processing and fine-grained analysis. The system emphasizes explainability, structured reporting, and user auditability, providing complete traceability from source evidence to final conclusions. We discuss critical tradeoffs between agent specialization, system complexity, and resource usage, as well as the integration of deterministic code for validation. An open, interactive user interface allows researchers to directly observe, explore and evaluate the multi-agent workflow. Our evaluation demonstrates substantial gains in efficiency and output consistency, highlighting M-Reason's potential as both a practical tool for evidence synthesis and a testbed for robust multi-agent LLM systems in scientific research, available at https://m-reason.digitalecmt.com.

ABSTRACT The rapid spread of misinformation on social media underscores the need for scalable fact-checking tools. A key step is claim detection, which identifies statements that can be objectively verified. Prior approaches often rely on linguistic cues or claim check-worthiness, but these struggle with vague political discourse and diverse formats such as tweets. We present RA VE (Retrieval and Scoring A ware V erifiable Claim Detection), a framework that combines evidence retrieval with structured signals of relevance and source credibility. Experiments on CT22-test and PoliClaim-test show that RA VE consistently outperforms text-only and retrieval-based baselines in both accuracy and F1.

Misinformation in healthcare, from vaccine hesitancy to unproven treatments, poses risks to public health and trust in medical systems. While machine learning and natural language processing have advanced automated fact-checking, validating biomedical claims remains uniquely challenging due to complex terminology, the need for domain expertise, and the critical importance of grounding in scientific evidence. We introduce CER (Combining Evidence and Reasoning), a novel framework for biomedical fact-checking that integrates scientific evidence retrieval, reasoning via large language models, and supervised veracity prediction. By integrating the text-generation capabilities of large language models with advanced retrieval techniques for high-quality biomedical scientific evidence, CER effectively mitigates the risk of hallucinations, ensuring that generated outputs are grounded in verifiable, evidence-based sources. Evaluations on expert-annotated datasets (HealthFC, BioASQ-7b, SciFact) demonstrate state-of-the-art performance and promising cross-dataset generalization. Code and data are released for transparency and reproducibility: https://github.com/PRAISELab-PicusLab/CER

Scientific fact-checking aims to determine the veracity of scientific claims by retrieving and analysing evidence from research literature. The problem is inherently more complex than general fact-checking since it must accommodate the evolving nature of scientific knowledge, the structural complexity of academic literature and the challenges posed by long-form, multimodal scientific expression. However, existing approaches focus on simplified versions of the problem based on small-scale datasets consisting of abstracts rather than full papers, thereby avoiding the distinct challenges associated with processing complete documents. This paper examines the limitations of current scientific fact-checking systems and reveals the many potential features and resources that could be exploited to advance their performance. It identifies key research challenges within evidence retrieval, including (1) evidence-driven retrieval that addresses semantic limitations and topic imbalance (2) time-aware evidence retrieval with citation tracking to mitigate outdated information, (3) structured document parsing to leverage long-range context, (4) handling complex scientific expressions, including tables, figures, and domain-specific terminology and (5) assessing the credibility of scientific literature. Preliminary experiments were conducted to substantiate these challenges and identify potential solutions. This perspective paper aims to advance scientific fact-checking with a specialised IR system tailored for real-world applications.

This paper presents HerO 2, Team HUMANE's system for the AVeriTeC shared task at the FEVER-25 workshop. HerO 2 is an enhanced version of HerO, the best-performing open-source model from the previous year's challenge. It improves evidence quality through document summarization and answer reformulation, optimizes veracity prediction via post-training quantization under computational constraints, and enhances overall system performance by integrating updated language model (LM) backbones. HerO 2 ranked second on the leaderboard while achieving the shortest runtime among the top three systems, demonstrating both high efficiency and strong potential for real-world fact verification. The code is available at https://github.com/ssu-humane/HerO2.

Fact verification plays a vital role in combating misinformation by assessing the veracity of claims through evidence retrieval and reasoning. However, traditional methods struggle with complex claims requiring multi-hop reasoning over fragmented evidence, as they often rely on static decomposition strategies and surface-level semantic retrieval, which fail to capture the nuanced structure and intent of the claim. This results in accumulated reasoning errors, noisy evidence contamination, and limited adaptability to diverse claims, ultimately undermining verification accuracy in complex scenarios. To address this, we propose A tomic F act E xtraction and V erification (AFEV), a novel framework that iteratively decomposes complex claims into atomic facts, enabling fine-grained retrieval and adaptive reasoning. AFEV dynamically refines claim understanding and reduces error propagation through iterative fact extraction, reranks evidence to filter noise, and leverages context-specific demonstrations to guide the reasoning process. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets demonstrate that AFEV achieves state-of-the-art performance in both accuracy and interpretability. Introduction Fact verification is a critical task aimed at assessing the veracity of claims and typically involves two fundamental stages: evidence retrieval and claim verification. During the evidence retrieval phase, relevant pieces of information are identified from large-scale corpora. In the subsequent verification phase, the retrieved evidence is synthesized and analyzed to determine the veracity of the claim [1].

The growing complexity of factual claims in real-world scenarios presents significant challenges for automated fact verification systems, particularly in accurately aggregating and reasoning over multi-hop evidence. Existing approaches often rely on static or shallow models that fail to capture the evolving structure of reasoning paths, leading to fragmented retrieval and limited interpretability. To address these issues, we propose a Structural Reasoning framework for Multi-hop Fact Verification that explicitly models reasoning paths as structured graphs throughout both evidence retrieval and claim verification stages. Our method comprises two key modules: a structure-enhanced retrieval mechanism that constructs reasoning graphs to guide evidence collection, and a reasoning-path-guided verification module that incrementally builds subgraphs to represent evolving inference trajectories. We further incorporate a structure-aware reasoning mechanism that captures long-range dependencies across multi-hop evidence chains, enabling more precise verification. Extensive experiments on the FEVER and HoVer datasets demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms strong baselines, highlighting the effectiveness of reasoning-path modeling in enhancing retrieval precision and verification accuracy.