# EMULATE: A Multi-Agent Framework for Determining the Veracity of Atomic Claims by Emulating Human Actions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.16576 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16576/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Web, search, and research agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 9 of its 12 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 May 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Web, search, and research agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/web-search-and-research-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [FActScore: Fine-grained Atomic Evaluation of Factual Precision in Long Form Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14251/) (2023)
- [Fact-Checking Complex Claims with Program-Guided Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12744/) (2023)
- [VERISCORE: Evaluating the factuality of verifiable claims in long-form text generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19276/) (2024)
- [Complex Claim Verification with Evidence Retrieved in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11859/) (2023)
- [Factcheck-Bench: Fine-Grained Evaluation Benchmark for Automatic Fact-checkers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09000/) (2023)
- [Can LLMs Produce Faithful Explanations For Fact-checking? Towards Faithful Explainable Fact-Checking via Multi-Agent Debate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07401/) (2024)
- [FIRE: Fact-checking with Iterative Retrieval and Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00784/) (2024)
- [Decomposition Dilemmas: Does Claim Decomposition Boost or Burden Fact-Checking Performance?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02400/) (2024)
- [Evidence-backed Fact Checking using RAG and Few-Shot In-Context Learning with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12060/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Exploring Health Misinformation Detection with Multi-Agent Debate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.09935/) (2025)
- [TRUST Agents: A Collaborative Multi-Agent Framework for Fake News Detection, Explainable Verification, and Logic-Aware Claim Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12184/) (2026)
- [Large Language Models in Misinformation Ecosystems: Misuse, Defense, and Vulnerability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.10402/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Determining the veracity of atomic claims is an imperative component of many recently proposed fact-checking systems. Many approaches tackle this problem by first retrieving evidence by querying a search engine and then performing classification by providing the evidence set and atomic claim to a large language model, but this process deviates from what a human would do in order to perform the task. Recent work attempted to address this issue by proposing iterative evidence retrieval, allowing for evidence to be collected several times and only when necessary. Continuing along this line of research, we propose a novel claim verification system, called EMULATE, which is designed to better emulate human actions through the use of a multi-agent framework where each agent performs a small part of the larger task, such as ranking search results according to predefined criteria or evaluating webpage content. Extensive experiments on several benchmarks show clear improvements over prior work, demonstrating the efficacy of our new multi-agent framework.