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PurifAI: Detecting and Fixing Search-Induced Distortions in Web-Augmented LLMs

sigir26-226 · Full research paper · Guoqing Wang, Zhao Zhang, Zeyu Sun, Xiaofei Xie, Yizhou Chen, Yanchao Tan, Dan Hao
Knowledge Conflict and Faithfulness · 50% Automated Fact Checking and Claim Ve · 50%
Abstract

As Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly serve as interfaces for proprietary data (e.g., enterprise knowledge bases, legal statutes), ensuring their fidelity to trusted internal information is paramount. While integrating real-time web search can enhance model utility, it introduces a critical vulnerability: the ingestion of conflicting, misleading, or hallucinated content from the open web can override the model's adherence to its verified internal knowledge. We define this failure mode as search-induced distortion, a significant risk in high-stakes domains where the internal knowledge base serves as the absolute ground truth. To address this challenge, we present PurifAI, a proactive, model-agnostic, cache-level purification system designed for safety- and compliance-sensitive deployments. Rather than serving as a general fact-checking engine, PurifAI is explicitly designed to preserve knowledge alignment with a pre-defined trusted knowledge core. It automatically generates diagnostic probes from trusted documents to identify and neutralize searched web content that conflicts with the canonical internal source before such content distorts the LLM's responses. Extensive evaluations on news, encyclopedic, and legal domains show that PurifAI effectively improves alignment with the trusted core, identifying and blocking distortive content at the source and achieving repair success rates above 70% across mainstream LLMs. Our work offers a practical safeguard for enterprises and other high-stakes applications seeking to integrate web-augmented LLMs without compromising policy consistency and trusted knowledge integrity.

Assigned reviewers

#ReviewerMatchWhy (closest evidence publications in the taxonomy)
1 Farima Fatahi Bayat
67
68 FactBench: A Dynamic Benchmark for In-the-Wild Language Model Factuality Evaluation (2025) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification
68 Enhancing Language Model Factuality via Activation-Based Confidence Calibration and Guided Decoding (2024) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification
36 From Proof to Program: Characterizing Tool-Induced Reasoning Hallucinations in Large Language Models (2026) Reward Modeling and Process Supervision
2 Weizhi Xu 0002
66
68 Bias Mitigation for Evidence-aware Fake News Detection by Causal Intervention (2022) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification
68 Heterogeneous Graph Reasoning for Fact Checking over Texts and Tables (2024) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification
68 Adversarial Contrastive Learning for Evidence-Aware Fake News Detection With Graph Neural Networks (2024) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification

Area chair

Area chairMatch
Xiaoxi Li 0005 39
Area-chair candidates (6)
Xiaoxi Li 0005 assigned 3915 papers
Yi R. Fung 0001 3810 papers
Xiaoxue Zang 344 papers
Dacheng Tao 345 papers
Zhijing Wu 0001 339 papers
Hongjin Qian 3312 papers

Candidates from the panel ranked by match score

#ReviewerMatchLoadWhy
1 Farima Fatahi Bayat assigned 67 3
68 FactBench: A Dynamic Benchmark for In-the-Wild Language Model Factuality Evaluation (2025) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification
68 Enhancing Language Model Factuality via Activation-Based Confidence Calibration and Guided Decoding (2024) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification
2 Weizhi Xu 0002 assigned 66 3
68 Bias Mitigation for Evidence-aware Fake News Detection by Causal Intervention (2022) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification
68 Heterogeneous Graph Reasoning for Fact Checking over Texts and Tables (2024) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification
3 Qisheng Hu 53 3
68 Decomposition Dilemmas: Does Claim Decomposition Boost or Burden Fact-Checking Performance? (2025) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification
67 Coordinating Search-Informed Reasoning and Reasoning-Guided Search in Claim Verification (2026) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification
4 Bo Wang 0069 45 3
68 A Graph-Enhanced Defense Framework for Explainable Fake News Detection with LLM (2026) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification
68 Explainable Fake News Detection with Large Language Model via Defense Among Competing Wisdom (2024) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification
5 Mariano Barone 45 3
86 Combining Evidence and Reasoning for Biomedical Fact-Checking (2025) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification
72 Combating Biomedical Misinformation through Multi-modal Claim Detection and Evidence-based Verification (2025) RAG for Domain Applications
6 Shu Zhou 0002 42 3
100 Cascaded Verification Framework: A Progressive Approach for Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Language Models (2026) Knowledge Conflict and Faithfulness
100 Calibrating Uncertainty with Cross-Model Consistency for LLM Hallucination Mitigation (2026) Knowledge Conflict and Faithfulness
7 Chen Zhao 0013 42 3
68 Large Language Models Help Humans Verify Truthfulness - Except When They Are Convincingly Wrong (2024) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification
68 FinDVer: Explainable Claim Verification over Long and Hybrid-content Financial Documents (2024) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification
8 Ruichao Yang 41 3
72 A Graph-Enhanced Defense Framework for Explainable Fake News Detection with LLM (2026) RAG for Domain Applications
68 Explainable Fake News Detection with Large Language Model via Defense Among Competing Wisdom (2024) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification
9 Armin Toroghi 41 3
70 CoLoTa: A Dataset for Entity-based Commonsense Reasoning over Long-Tail Knowledge (2025) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification
70 Right for Right Reasons: Large Language Models for Verifiable Commonsense Knowledge Graph Question Answering (2024) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification
10 Jing Liu 0022 39 3
68 Unveiling Knowledge Utilization Mechanisms in LLM-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025) Knowledge Conflict and Faithfulness
67 Reinforced Informativeness Optimization for Long-Form Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement
11 Xingyu Tan 0001 39 3
41 HydraRAG: Structured Cross-Source Enhanced Large Language Model Reasoning (2025) KG-Augmented LLM Reasoning
41 MemoTime: Memory-Augmented Temporal Knowledge Graph Enhanced Large Language Model Reasoning (2026) KG-Augmented LLM Reasoning
13 Venktesh V 38 3
68 The CLEF-2025 CheckThat! Lab: Subjectivity, Fact-Checking, Claim Normalization, and Retrieval (2025) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification
68 FlashCheck: Exploration of Efficient Evidence Retrieval for Fast Fact-Checking (2025) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification
14 Qinggang Zhang 38 3
68 FaithfulRAG: Fact-Level Conflict Modeling for Context-Faithful Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025) Knowledge Conflict and Faithfulness
40 You Don't Need Pre-Built Graphs for RAG: Retrieval Augmented Generation with Adaptive Reasoning Structures (2026) Multi-Hop and Iterative Retrieval Reasoning
16 Wenyu Huang 36 3
39 Masking in Multi-hop QA: An Analysis of How Language Models Perform with Context Permutation (2025) Multi-hop and Complex Reasoning QA
39 Prompting large language models with knowledge graphs for question answering involving long-tail facts (2025) KG-Augmented LLM Reasoning
17 Yu-An Liu 0028 36 3
68 AdversarialCoT: Single-Document Retrieval Poisoning for LLM Reasoning (2026) Knowledge Conflict and Faithfulness
68 Compete to Complete: Co-opetition Adversarial Learning for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026) Knowledge Conflict and Faithfulness
18 Sajad Ebrahimi 0001 36 3
68 Peerispect: Claim Verification in Scientific Peer Reviews (2026) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification
33 Can LLMs Uphold Research Integrity? Evaluating the Role of LLMs in Peer Review Quality (2026) Fake News, Fact Checking and Misinformation › Others
19 Farzad Shami 36 3
40 Fact Verification in Knowledge Graphs Using LLMs (2025) KG-Augmented LLM Reasoning
40 Benchmarking Large Language Models for Knowledge Graph Validation (2026) KG-Augmented LLM Reasoning
20 Idan Szpektor 35 3
68 TrueTeacher: Learning Factual Consistency Evaluation with Large Language Models (2023) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification
64 DisentQA: Disentangling Parametric and Contextual Knowledge with Counterfactual Question Answering (2023) Knowledge Conflict and Faithfulness
21 Yujia Zhou 0002 35 3
68 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
22 Yu Gu 0016 35 3
41 HippoRAG: Neurobiologically Inspired Long-Term Memory for Large Language Models (2024) KG-Augmented LLM Reasoning
40 Few-shot In-context Learning on Knowledge Base Question Answering (2023) Multi-hop and Complex Reasoning QA
23 Xi Ye 0003 35 3
68 Effective Large Language Model Adaptation for Improved Grounding and Citation Generation (2024) Knowledge Conflict and Faithfulness
39 Connecting Attributions and QA Model Behavior on Realistic Counterfactuals (2021) Multi-hop and Complex Reasoning QA
24 Weiwei Sun 0001 35 3
68 Contrastive Learning Reduces Hallucination in Conversations (2023) Knowledge Conflict and Faithfulness
42 Direct Retrieval-augmented Optimization: Synergizing Knowledge Selection and Language Models (2026) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement
25 Kaixin Ma 35 3
67 Chain-of-Note: Enhancing Robustness in Retrieval-Augmented Language Models (2024) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement
40 Retrieval-augmented GUI Agents with Generative Guidelines (2025) Agentic and Deep Search RAG
26 Xiao Zhang 0034 35 3
68 ReDeEP: Detecting Hallucination in Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Mechanistic Interpretability (2025) Knowledge Conflict and Faithfulness
68 LargePiG for Hallucination-Free Query Generation: Your Large Language Model is Secretly a Pointer Generator (2025) Knowledge Conflict and Faithfulness
27 Ori Yoran 35 3
54 Making Retrieval-Augmented Language Models Robust to Irrelevant Context (2024) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement
39 Answering Questions by Meta-Reasoning over Multiple Chains of Thought (2023) Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval and Ranking
28 Di Wu 0054 35 3
68 Synchronous Faithfulness Monitoring for Trustworthy Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2024) Knowledge Conflict and Faithfulness
34 Repoformer: Selective Retrieval for Repository-Level Code Completion (2024) Efficient and Long-Context RAG
29 Jinheon Baek 34 3
68 Efficient Real-time Refinement of Language Model Text Generation (2025) Knowledge Conflict and Faithfulness
42 Adaptive-RAG: Learning to Adapt Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models through Question Complexity (2024) Multi-Hop and Iterative Retrieval Reasoning
30 Qingyi Si 34 3
70 Are Large Language Models Table-based Fact-Checkers? (2024) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification
68 Breaking the Trade-Off Between Faithfulness and Expressiveness for Large Language Models (2026) Knowledge Conflict and Faithfulness
32 Jiapu Wang 34 3
41 Decomposing and Revising What Language Models Generate (2025) Multi-Hop and Iterative Retrieval Reasoning
41 Atomic Fact Decomposition Helps Attributed Question Answering (2025) Multi-Hop and Iterative Retrieval Reasoning
34 Archiki Prasad 34 3
68 AdaCAD: Adaptively Decoding to Balance Conflicts between Contextual and Parametric Knowledge (2025) Knowledge Conflict and Faithfulness
35 ReCEval: Evaluating Reasoning Chains via Correctness and Informativeness (2023) Reasoning Evaluation and Benchmarks