PurifAI: Detecting and Fixing Search-Induced Distortions in Web-Augmented LLMs
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
| # | Reviewer | Match | Why (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 |
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| 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 chair | Match | |
|---|---|---|
| Xiaoxi Li 0005 | 39 |
Area-chair candidates (6)
| Xiaoxi Li 0005 assigned | 39 | 15 papers | |
| Yi R. Fung 0001 | 38 | 10 papers | |
| Xiaoxue Zang | 34 | 4 papers | |
| Dacheng Tao | 34 | 5 papers | |
| Zhijing Wu 0001 | 33 | 9 papers | |
| Hongjin Qian | 33 | 12 papers |
Candidates from the panel ranked by match score
| # | Reviewer | Match | Load | Why | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |