# Towards Unification of Hallucination Detection and Fact Verification for Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.02772 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02772/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 72 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Qwen2.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15115/) (2024)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09600/) (2018)
- [TruthfulQA: Measuring How Models Mimic Human Falsehoods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07958/) (2021)
- [TriviaQA: A Large Scale Distantly Supervised Challenge Dataset for Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03551/) (2017)
- [FEVER: a large-scale dataset for Fact Extraction and VERification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05355/) (2018)
- [Constructing A Multi-hop QA Dataset for Comprehensive Evaluation of Reasoning Steps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.01060/) (2020)
- [FActScore: Fine-grained Atomic Evaluation of Factual Precision in Long Form Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14251/) (2023)
- [When Not to Trust Language Models: Investigating Effectiveness of Parametric and Non-Parametric Memories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10511/) (2022)
- [A Survey on In-context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00234/) (2022)
- [The Internal State of an LLM Knows When It's Lying](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13734/) (2023)
- [Magentic-One: A Generalist Multi-Agent System for Solving Complex Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04468/) (2024)
- [FEVEROUS: Fact Extraction and VERification Over Unstructured and Structured information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05707/) (2021)
- [Combining Fact Extraction and Verification with Neural Semantic Matching Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.07039/) (2018)
- [GEAR: Graph-based Evidence Aggregating and Reasoning for Fact Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.01843/) (2019)
- [Enhancing Uncertainty-Based Hallucination Detection with Stronger Focus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13230/) (2023)
- [Towards LLM-based Fact Verification on News Claims with a Hierarchical Step-by-Step Prompting Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00305/) (2023)
- [Beyond News Contents: The Role of Social Context for Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.07709/) (2017)
- [BERT for Evidence Retrieval and Claim Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02655/) (2019)
- [ProoFVer: Natural Logic Theorem Proving for Fact Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11357/) (2021)
- [Large Language Model-based Human-Agent Collaboration for Complex Task Solving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12914/) (2024)
- [Improving Uncertainty Quantification in Large Language Models via Semantic Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.22685/) (2024)
- [InterrogateLLM: Zero-Resource Hallucination Detection in LLM-Generated Answers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02889/) (2024)
- [Knowledge Editing through Chain-of-Thought](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17727/) (2024)
- [Towards a Search Engine for Machines: Unified Ranking for Multiple Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.00175/) (2024)
- [JuDGE: Benchmarking Judgment Document Generation for Chinese Legal System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14258/) (2025)
- [Read it Twice: Towards Faithfully Interpretable Fact Verification by Revisiting Evidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03507/) (2023)
- [Mitigating Entity-Level Hallucination in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09417/) (2024)
- [SurGE: A Benchmark and Evaluation Framework for Scientific Survey Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15658/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Skill Retrieval Augmentation for Agentic AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.24594/) (2026)
- [DepthCharge: A Domain-Agnostic Framework for Measuring Depth-Dependent Knowledge in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.23514/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently exhibit hallucinations, generating content that appears fluent and coherent but is factually incorrect. Such errors undermine trust and hinder their adoption in real-world applications. To address this challenge, two distinct research paradigms have emerged: model-centric Hallucination Detection (HD) and text-centric Fact Verification (FV). Despite sharing the same goal, these paradigms have evolved in isolation, using distinct assumptions, datasets, and evaluation protocols. This separation has created a research schism that hinders their collective progress. In this work, we take a decisive step toward bridging this divide. We introduce UniFact, a unified evaluation framework that enables direct, instance-level comparison between FV and HD by dynamically generating model outputs and corresponding factuality labels. Through large-scale experiments across multiple LLM families and detection methods, we reveal three key findings: (1) No paradigm is universally superior; (2) HD and FV capture complementary facets of factual errors; and (3) hybrid approaches that integrate both methods consistently achieve state-of-the-art performance. Beyond benchmarking, we provide the first in-depth analysis of why FV and HD diverged, as well as empirical evidence supporting the need for their unification. The comprehensive experimental results call for a new, integrated research agenda toward unifying Hallucination Detection and Fact Verification in LLMs. We have open-sourced all the code, data, and baseline implementation at: https://github.com/oneal2000/UniFact/