# FactKB: Generalizable Factuality Evaluation using Language Models Enhanced with Factual Knowledge

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.08281 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08281/

## Key facts

- Cited by 55 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 71 of its 114 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 71)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Locating and Editing Factual Associations in GPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05262/) (2022)
- [Don't Stop Pretraining: Adapt Language Models to Domains and Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10964/) (2020)
- [Don't Give Me the Details, Just the Summary! Topic-Aware Convolutional Neural Networks for Extreme Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08745/) (2018)
- [Measuring and Narrowing the Compositionality Gap in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03350/) (2022)
- [ConceptNet 5.5: An Open Multilingual Graph of General Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03975/) (2016)
- [StereoSet: Measuring stereotypical bias in pretrained language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09456/) (2020)
- [On Faithfulness and Factuality in Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00661/) (2020)
- [Evaluating the Factual Consistency of Abstractive Text Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.12840/) (2019)
- [Text Summarization with Pretrained Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08345/) (2019)
- [Fact or Fiction: Verifying Scientific Claims](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14974/) (2020)
- [SummaC: Re-Visiting NLI-based Models for Inconsistency Detection in Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09525/) (2021)
- [Composition-based Multi-Relational Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03082/) (2019)
- [QA-GNN: Reasoning with Language Models and Knowledge Graphs for Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06378/) (2021)
- [Asking and Answering Questions to Evaluate the Factual Consistency of Summaries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04228/) (2020)
- [KEPLER: A Unified Model for Knowledge Embedding and Pre-trained Language Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.06136/) (2019)
- [Towards Understanding and Mitigating Social Biases in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13219/) (2021)
- [Understanding Factuality in Abstractive Summarization with FRANK: A Benchmark for Factuality Metrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13346/) (2021)
- [Symbolic Knowledge Distillation: from General Language Models to Commonsense Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07178/) (2021)
- [QuestEval: Summarization Asks for Fact-based Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12693/) (2021)
- [QAFactEval: Improved QA-Based Factual Consistency Evaluation for Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08542/) (2021)
- [Generated Knowledge Prompting for Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08387/) (2021)
- [On Second Thought, Let's Not Think Step by Step! Bias and Toxicity in Zero-Shot Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08061/) (2022)
- [CORD-19: The COVID-19 Open Research Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10706/) (2020)
- [GreaseLM: Graph REASoning Enhanced Language Models for Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08860/) (2022)
- [Deep Bidirectional Language-Knowledge Graph Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09338/) (2022)
- [Revisiting the Gold Standard: Grounding Summarization Evaluation with Robust Human Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07981/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 55)

- [Unifying Large Language Models and Knowledge Graphs: A Roadmap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08302/) (2023)
- [Trusting Your Evidence: Hallucinate Less with Context-aware Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14739/) (2023)
- [On LLMs-Driven Synthetic Data Generation, Curation, and Evaluation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15126/) (2024)
- [Fine-grained Hallucination Detection and Editing for Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06855/) (2024)
- [HalluciDoctor: Mitigating Hallucinatory Toxicity in Visual Instruction Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13614/) (2023)
- [Best Practices and Lessons Learned on Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07503/) (2024)
- [ExpertQA: Expert-Curated Questions and Attributed Answers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07852/) (2023)
- [FineSurE: Fine-grained Summarization Evaluation using LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00908/) (2024)
- [Self-Taught Evaluators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02666/) (2024)
- [Resolving Knowledge Conflicts in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00935/) (2023)
- [Knowledge Card: Filling LLMs' Knowledge Gaps with Plug-in Specialized Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09955/) (2023)
- [HalluDial: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Automatic Dialogue-Level Hallucination Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07070/) (2024)
- [QACHECK: A Demonstration System for Question-Guided Multi-Hop Fact-Checking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07609/) (2023)
- [The Scales of Justitia: A Comprehensive Survey on Safety Evaluation of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.11094/) (2025)
- [DeCoRe: Decoding by Contrasting Retrieval Heads to Mitigate Hallucinations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18860/) (2024)
- [KnowledgeNavigator: Leveraging Large Language Models for Enhanced Reasoning over Knowledge Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15880/) (2023)
- [Graph-Based Retriever Captures the Long Tail of Biomedical Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12352/) (2024)
- [Improving Factuality in Large Language Models via Decoding-Time Hallucinatory and Truthful Comparators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12325/) (2024)
- [Do Large Language Models Have an English Accent? Evaluating and Improving the Naturalness of Multilingual LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15956/) (2024)
- [User Modeling in the Era of Large Language Models: Current Research and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11518/) (2023)
- [CrossCheckGPT: Universal Hallucination Ranking for Multimodal Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13684/) (2024)
- [The Hallucinations Leaderboard -- An Open Effort to Measure Hallucinations in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05904/) (2024)
- [DiaHalu: A Dialogue-level Hallucination Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00896/) (2024)
- [FG-PRM: Fine-grained Hallucination Detection and Mitigation in Language Model Mathematical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06304/) (2024)
- [Sentiment Analysis through LLM Negotiations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01876/) (2023)
- [AMRFact: Enhancing Summarization Factuality Evaluation with AMR-Driven Negative Samples Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09521/) (2023)
- [Context-aware Decoding Reduces Hallucination in Query-focused Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14335/) (2023)
- [Evaluating the Factuality of Large Language Models using Large-Scale Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00942/) (2024)
- [Dynamic Attention-Guided Context Decoding for Mitigating Context Faithfulness Hallucinations in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01059/) (2025)
- [SPARTA ALIGNMENT: Collectively Aligning Multiple Language Models through Combat](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04721/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Evaluating the factual consistency of automatically generated summaries is essential for the progress and adoption of reliable summarization systems. Despite recent advances, existing factuality evaluation models are not robust, being especially prone to entity and relation errors in new domains. We propose FactKB, a simple new approach to factuality evaluation that is generalizable across domains, in particular with respect to entities and relations. FactKB is based on language models pretrained using facts extracted from external knowledge bases. We introduce three types of complementary factuality pretraining objectives based on direct entity facts, facts grounded in auxiliary knowledge about entities, and facts constructed compositionally through knowledge base walks. The resulting factuality evaluation model achieves state-of-the-art performance on two in-domain news summarization benchmarks as well as on three out-of-domain scientific literature datasets. Further analysis of FactKB shows improved ability to detect erroneous entities and relations in summaries and is robust and generalizable across domains.