Multi-Sourced, Multi-Agent Evidence Retrieval for Fact-Checking
sigir26-162 · Full research paper · Shuzhi Gong, Richard Sinnott, Jianzhong Qi, Cécile L. Paris, Preslav Nakov, Zhuohan Xie
Automated Fact Checking and Claim Ve · 50% Multi-Hop and Iterative Retrieval Re · 25% RAG for Domain Applications · 25%
Abstract
Misinformation spreading over the Internet poses a significant threat to both societies and individuals, necessitating robust and scalable fact-checking that relies on retrieving accurate and trustworthy evidence. Previous methods rely on semantic and social-contextual patterns learned from training data, which limits their generalization to new data distributions. Recently, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) based methods have been proposed to utilize the reasoning capability of LLMs with retrieved grounding evidence documents. However, these methods largely rely on textual similarity for evidence retrieval and struggle to retrieve evidence that captures multi-hop semantic relations within rich document contents. These limitations lead to overlooking subtle factual correlations between the evidence and the claims to be fact-checked during evidence retrieval, thus causing inaccurate veracity predictions.
Assigned reviewers
| # | Reviewer | Match | Why (closest evidence publications in the taxonomy) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Weizhi Xu 0002 | 67 | 69 Heterogeneous Graph Reasoning for Fact Checking over Texts and Tables (2024) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification 69 Adversarial Contrastive Learning for Evidence-Aware Fake News Detection With Graph Neural Networks (2024) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification 69 Bias Mitigation for Evidence-aware Fake News Detection by Causal Intervention (2022) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification |
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| 2 | Qisheng Hu | 55 | 69 Decomposition Dilemmas: Does Claim Decomposition Boost or Burden Fact-Checking Performance? (2025) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification 68 Coordinating Search-Informed Reasoning and Reasoning-Guided Search in Claim Verification (2026) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification 43 Just What You Desire: Constrained Timeline Summarization with Self-Reflection for Enhanced Relevance (2025) Multi-hop and Complex Reasoning QA |
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| 3 | Mariano Barone | 51 | 87 Combining Evidence and Reasoning for Biomedical Fact-Checking (2025) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification 86 Combating Biomedical Misinformation through Multi-modal Claim Detection and Evidence-based Verification (2025) RAG for Domain Applications 39 SOLVE-Med: Specialized Orchestration for Leading Vertical Experts Across Medical Specialties (2025) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA |
Area chair
| Area chair | Match | |
|---|---|---|
| Hongjin Qian | 40 |
Area-chair candidates (6)
| Xiaoxi Li 0005 | 40 | 15 papers | |
| Hongjin Qian assigned | 40 | 12 papers | |
| Zhijing Wu 0001 | 39 | 9 papers | |
| Yi R. Fung 0001 COI: co-author | 36 | 10 papers | |
| Jun Xu 0001 | 35 | 2 papers | |
| Xiaoxue Zang | 34 | 4 papers |
Candidates from the panel ranked by match score
| # | Reviewer | Match | Load | Why | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Weizhi Xu 0002 assigned | 67 | 3 | 69 Heterogeneous Graph Reasoning for Fact Checking over Texts and Tables (2024) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification 69 Adversarial Contrastive Learning for Evidence-Aware Fake News Detection With Graph Neural Networks (2024) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification |
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| 2 | Farima Fatahi Bayat | 66 | 3 | 69 FactBench: A Dynamic Benchmark for In-the-Wild Language Model Factuality Evaluation (2025) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification 69 Enhancing Language Model Factuality via Activation-Based Confidence Calibration and Guided Decoding (2024) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification |
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| 3 | Qisheng Hu assigned | 55 | 3 | 69 Decomposition Dilemmas: Does Claim Decomposition Boost or Burden Fact-Checking Performance? (2025) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification 68 Coordinating Search-Informed Reasoning and Reasoning-Guided Search in Claim Verification (2026) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification |
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| 4 | Mariano Barone assigned | 51 | 3 | 87 Combining Evidence and Reasoning for Biomedical Fact-Checking (2025) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification 86 Combating Biomedical Misinformation through Multi-modal Claim Detection and Evidence-based Verification (2025) RAG for Domain Applications |
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| 5 | Xingyu Tan 0001 | 48 | 3 | 55 HydraRAG: Structured Cross-Source Enhanced Large Language Model Reasoning (2025) KG-Augmented LLM Reasoning 55 Paths-over-Graph: Knowledge Graph Empowered Large Language Model Reasoning (2025) KG-Augmented LLM Reasoning |
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| 6 | Bo Wang 0069 | 46 | 3 | 69 A Graph-Enhanced Defense Framework for Explainable Fake News Detection with LLM (2026) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification 69 Explainable Fake News Detection with Large Language Model via Defense Among Competing Wisdom (2024) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification |
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| 7 | Ruichao Yang | 45 | 3 | 86 A Graph-Enhanced Defense Framework for Explainable Fake News Detection with LLM (2026) RAG for Domain Applications 69 Explainable Fake News Detection with Large Language Model via Defense Among Competing Wisdom (2024) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification |
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| 8 | Chen Zhao 0013 | 45 | 3 | 69 FinDVer: Explainable Claim Verification over Long and Hybrid-content Financial Documents (2024) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification 69 Large Language Models Help Humans Verify Truthfulness - Except When They Are Convincingly Wrong (2024) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification |
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| 9 | Shu Zhou 0002 | 45 | 3 | 73 Calibrating Uncertainty with Cross-Model Consistency for LLM Hallucination Mitigation (2026) Knowledge Conflict and Faithfulness 73 Cascaded Verification Framework: A Progressive Approach for Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Language Models (2026) Knowledge Conflict and Faithfulness |
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| 10 | Armin Toroghi | 43 | 3 | 71 CoLoTa: A Dataset for Entity-based Commonsense Reasoning over Long-Tail Knowledge (2025) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification 71 Right for Right Reasons: Large Language Models for Verifiable Commonsense Knowledge Graph Question Answering (2024) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification |
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| 11 | Venktesh V COI: co-author | 42 | 3 | 69 The CLEF-2025 CheckThat! Lab: Subjectivity, Fact-Checking, Claim Normalization, and Retrieval (2025) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification 69 FlashCheck: Exploration of Efficient Evidence Retrieval for Fast Fact-Checking (2025) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification |
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| 13 | Sajad Ebrahimi 0001 | 40 | 3 | 69 Peerispect: Claim Verification in Scientific Peer Reviews (2026) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification 33 PeerPrism: Peer Evaluation Expertise vs Review-writing AI (2026) Fake News, Fact Checking and Misinformation › Others |
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| 16 | Farzad Shami | 39 | 3 | 38 Fact Verification in Knowledge Graphs Using LLMs (2025) KG-Augmented LLM Reasoning 38 Benchmarking Large Language Models for Knowledge Graph Validation (2026) KG-Augmented LLM Reasoning |
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| 17 | Wenyu Huang | 38 | 3 | 43 Prompting large language models with knowledge graphs for question answering involving long-tail facts (2025) KG-Augmented LLM Reasoning 43 Masking in Multi-hop QA: An Analysis of How Language Models Perform with Context Permutation (2025) Multi-hop and Complex Reasoning QA |
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| 18 | Idan Szpektor COI: co-author | 38 | 3 | 69 TrueTeacher: Learning Factual Consistency Evaluation with Large Language Models (2023) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification 40 DisentQA: Disentangling Parametric and Contextual Knowledge with Counterfactual Question Answering (2023) Knowledge Conflict and Faithfulness |
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| 19 | Yu Gu 0016 | 38 | 3 | 55 HippoRAG: Neurobiologically Inspired Long-Term Memory for Large Language Models (2024) KG-Augmented LLM Reasoning 42 Few-shot In-context Learning on Knowledge Base Question Answering (2023) Multi-hop and Complex Reasoning QA |
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| 20 | Qinggang Zhang | 38 | 3 | 53 You Don't Need Pre-Built Graphs for RAG: Retrieval Augmented Generation with Adaptive Reasoning Structures (2026) Multi-Hop and Iterative Retrieval Reasoning 43 Knapsack Optimization-Based Schema Linking for LLM-Based Text-to-SQL Generation (2026) Multi-hop and Complex Reasoning QA |
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| 21 | Jinheon Baek | 37 | 3 | 54 Adaptive-RAG: Learning to Adapt Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models through Question Complexity (2024) Multi-Hop and Iterative Retrieval Reasoning 52 Knowledge-Augmented Reasoning Distillation for Small Language Models in Knowledge-Intensive Tasks (2023) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA |
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| 22 | Jiapu Wang | 37 | 3 | 55 Atomic Fact Decomposition Helps Attributed Question Answering (2025) Multi-Hop and Iterative Retrieval Reasoning 55 Decomposing and Revising What Language Models Generate (2025) Multi-Hop and Iterative Retrieval Reasoning |
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| 23 | Ben Liu 0002 | 37 | 3 | 52 MoodAngels: A Retrieval-augmented Multi-agent Framework for Psychiatry Diagnosis (2025) RAG for Domain Applications 38 SymAgent: A Neural-Symbolic Self-Learning Agent Framework for Complex Reasoning over Knowledge Graphs (2025) Reasoning Evaluation and Benchmarks |
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| 25 | Wonduk Seo | 36 | 3 | 36 Automated Visualization Code Synthesis via Multi-path Reasoning and Feedback-Driven Optimizations (2026) Reasoning Evaluation and Benchmarks 35 SPIO: Ensemble and Selective Strategies via LLM-Based Multi-Agent Planning in Automated Data Science (2026) Multi-Agent and Tool-Use Orchestration |
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| 26 | Kaixin Ma | 36 | 3 | 54 Retrieval-augmented GUI Agents with Generative Guidelines (2025) Agentic and Deep Search RAG 42 Chain-of-Note: Enhancing Robustness in Retrieval-Augmented Language Models (2024) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement |
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| 27 | Adam Jatowt | 35 | 3 | 43 Inferential Question Answering (2026) Multi-hop and Complex Reasoning QA 43 Wrong Answers Can Also Be Useful: PlausibleQA - A Large-Scale QA Dataset with Answer Plausibility Scores (2025) Multi-hop and Complex Reasoning QA |
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| 29 | Ori Yoran | 35 | 3 | 44 Answering Questions by Meta-Reasoning over Multiple Chains of Thought (2023) Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval and Ranking 43 Making Retrieval-Augmented Language Models Robust to Irrelevant Context (2024) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement |
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| 30 | Yuzhong Qu | 35 | 3 | 41 Enhancing Complex Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs through Evidence Pattern Retrieval (2024) Knowledge Graph Question Answering 41 Skeleton parsing for complex question answering over knowledge bases (2022) Knowledge Graph Question Answering |
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| 31 | Jing Liu 0022 | 34 | 3 | 42 Reinforced Informativeness Optimization for Long-Form Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement 41 REAR: A Relevance-Aware Retrieval-Augmented Framework for Open-Domain Question Answering (2024) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement |
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| 32 | Jialong Wu 0007 | 34 | 3 | 41 WebWalker: Benchmarking LLMs in Web Traversal (2025) Agentic and Deep Search RAG 37 OmniThink: Expanding Knowledge Boundaries in Machine Writing through Thinking (2025) Deep Research and Report Generation |
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| 33 | Mark D. Smucker | 34 | 3 | 87 Resources for Automated Evaluation of Assistive RAG Systems that Help Readers with News Trustworthiness Assessment (2026) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification 53 Simulating the Lateral Reader for News Trustworthiness Reports with an Iterative Multi-Agent RAG System (2026) Agentic and Deep Search RAG |
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| 34 | Wenlin Zhang 0001 | 34 | 3 | 40 MemSearch-o1: Empowering Large Language Models with Reasoning-Aligned Memory Growth in Agentic Search (2026) Agentic and Deep Search RAG 39 To Search or Not to Search: Aligning the Decision Boundary of Deep Search Agents via Causal Intervention (2026) Agentic and Deep Search RAG |
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| 36 | Yujia Zhou 0002 | 34 | 3 | 41 Robust Fine-tuning for Retrieval Augmented Generation against Retrieval Defects (2025) Knowledge Conflict and Faithfulness 39 RetroLLM: Empowering Large Language Models to Retrieve Fine-grained Evidence within Generation (2025) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement |