ResearchResearch paperLarge Language Models1 source · Oct 19, 2026

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Enhancing LLM Agents for Automated Fact-Checking with Human Expert Skills

Automated fact-checking (AFC) systems powered by large language model (LLM) agents still face challenges in evidence retrieval and claim verification.

Key points

  • To transfer professional fact-checking expertise to LLM agents efficiently, we distill publicly available guidelines published by Agence France-Presse (AFP) Fact Check into a reusable, modular Professional Fact-Checking Skill (PFC-Skill).
  • We then present SkillCheck, the first AFC system that gives LLM agents dynamic access to PFC-Skill to guide evidence retrieval and claim verification at inference time.
  • Extensive experiments demonstrate that SkillCheck improves upon skill-free DEFAME baselines across multiple LLM backbones, with gains of 2.2--4.8 pp. in Accuracy and 1.5--6.3 pp. in Macro-F1 on the AVeriTeC benchmark.
  • To conclude, our work shows that LLM agents can "stand on the shoulders of giants" by drawing on the best practices of professional fact-checkers, substantially enhancing AFC performance without extra training or continuous human supervision.

Sources (1)

  • [1]Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Enhancing LLM Agents for Automated Fact-Checking with Human Expert Skills
    arXiv (AI, ML, NLP, CV, robotics, multi-agent) · Oct 19, 04:44 AM
    Automated fact-checking (AFC) systems powered by large language model (LLM) agents still face challenges in evidence retrieval and claim verification.
    To transfer professional fact-checking expertise to LLM agents efficiently, we distill publicly available guidelines published by Agence France-Presse (AFP) Fact Check into a reusable, modular Professional Fact-Checking Skill (PFC-Skill).

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