Calibrated Selective Fact-Checking via Evidence Chain Evaluation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2607.18240v1
• Date: Wed, 15 Apr 2026 02:48:05 GMT
• Title: Calibrated Selective Fact-Checking via Evidence Chain Evaluation
• Abstract summary: Evidence Chain Evaluation (ECE) is a selective fact-checking framework that permits abstention via an uncertain verdict.<n>ECE achieves 91.6% standard accuracy, 93.7% coverage, and 97.8% selective accuracy on answered claims.
• Score: 0.16921396880325776
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) can achieve strong fact-checking accuracy, yet forced binary decisions conceal a critical reliability problem: systems may issue confident verdicts even when supporting evidence is weak, sparse, or internally inconsistent. We address this issue through Evidence Chain Evaluation (ECE), a selective fact-checking framework that permits abstention via an uncertain verdict instead of requiring a true/false decision for every claim. The evaluated system is a tool-using verification agent that gathers evidence through web search, scholarly search, and executable checks, and then returns a structured verdict with confidence and source-level metadata. On ECE-Bench, ECE achieves 91.6% standard accuracy, 93.7% coverage, and 97.8% selective accuracy on answered claims. Although ECE does not outperform the strongest retrieval baseline on aggregate calibration metrics such as Expected Calibration Error, Brier score, or AURC, it delivers a clear selective-prediction trade-off: the system maintains very high accuracy on answered claims while deferring 6 of 95 cases. These deferred cases are concentrated in lower-reliability evidence settings (5/6 at source level L4), supporting the view that abstention functions as a safety-oriented mechanism for handling epistemically weak evidence. Code is available at https://github.com/ cheshireyang/ECE.git

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