AGENTIC-SYSTEMSJuly 21, 20261 min read

Symbolic Augmentation Closes a Canonical-Equivalence Blind Spot in Neural Fact-Checkers

Large language models frequently hallucinate numbers and units when summarizing scientific claims, creating silent errors. Researchers introduce Symbolic Augmentation to resolve this canonical-equivalence blind spot, dramatically improving fact-checking accuracy without added inference costs.

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence

View PDF HTML (experimental)Abstract:Large language models hallucinate numbers and units when summarizing scientific text, a failure mode that can silently invert a scientific claim. We recast the detection of such errors as typed verification: we introduce a five-class typed-quantity error taxonomy and a 1500-item benchmark, rewritten from PMC and arXiv sources and labeled by two independent LLM annotators with adjudication (Krippendorff's alpha = 0.882). A ModernBERT encoder fine-tuned on this benchmark reaches macro-F1 = 0.899, far above any off-the-shelf neural fact-checker, yet four probes expose a sharp structural blind spot: on canonical-equivalent rewrites of physically equivalent quantities (e.g., 95°C and 368.15 K) its accuracy collapses to 36.5%. We propose Symbolic Augmentation, a training-time framework that runs the modules of a symbolic verifier in reverse to generate label-preserving augmented training data. The augmentation lifts canonical-equivalence robustness to 98.2% while slightly improving in-distribution accuracy (macro-F1: 0.899 to 0.902); the augmented encoder matches a closed-frontier LLM at no inference cost and transfers to an external benchmark (SciFact-Open binary macro-F1: 0.791 to 0.828). Two negative results sharpen the claim: symbolic features as auxiliary encoder inputs add nothing, and symbolic silver labels scale negatively under teacher noise. Together these results identify training-time augmentation as the right integration point between symbolic and learned components.

Bibliographic and Citation Tools

Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article

Demos

Recommenders and Search Tools

arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators

arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.

Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.

Source: arXiv cs.AI Recent

More in this category

agentic-systems

Generative Ontology Induction: Domain-Agnostic Schema Discovery from Document Corpora Using Large Language Models

Researchers introduce Generative Ontology Induction (GOI), a domain-agnostic framework that automatically extracts structured ontologies from document corpora using LLMs. Achieving 95-100% structural coverage, GOI addresses a major bottleneck in knowledge-intensive AI systems.

agentic-systems

JUMP: Single-Pass Membership Inference on Fine-Tuned Diffusion Language Models

Researchers have proposed JUMP, a novel single-pass membership inference attack designed for fine-tuned discrete diffusion language models (dLLMs). By leveraging the unique properties of dLLMs, JUMP significantly improves detection accuracy while drastically reducing the number of required queries.

agentic-systems

Masked Diffusion Language Models are Strong and Steerable Text-Based World Models for Agentic RL

Researchers demonstrate that Masked Diffusion Language Models (MDLMs) serve as highly effective, steerable text-based world models for agentic reinforcement learning. By leveraging bidirectional denoising, MDLMs outperform autoregressive models four times their size in coherence, groundedness, and rollout diversity.

NOW LET US Related – Democratizing AI with Small Language Models: Structured Benchmarking and Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for Local Deployment

agentic-systems

Democratizing AI with Small Language Models: Structured Benchmarking and Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for Local Deployment

A new study demonstrates that small language models (SLMs) under 3 billion parameters can serve as highly capable local experts for specialized tasks. By combining structured benchmarking with low-cost parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT), institutions can achieve AI autonomy without relying on expensive hardware.

agentic-systems

PlanFlip: Attacking Multi-Agent LLM Systems via Planning-Phase Prompt Injection

Researchers have introduced PlanFlip, a novel prompt injection attack framework targeting the planning phase of multi-agent LLM systems. The study reveals critical security blind spots in homogeneous agent pipelines and demonstrates that reasoning-augmented models like DeepSeek-R1 exhibit strong resistance.

agentic-systems

Rater State Bias in RLHF Preference Data: An Audit Framework

A new study identifies a structured bias in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) caused by the psychological state of human raters. Under stress, raters' shifting preferences can propagate through reward modeling, potentially compromising AI policy optimization.