mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

All That Glisters Is Not Gold: A Benchmark for Reference-Free Counterfactual Financial Misinformation Detection

arXiv 2601.04160 ↗First posted 7 Jan 2026cs.CL cs.CE q-fin.CPcited by 4

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Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce RFC Bench, a benchmark for evaluating large language models on financial misinformation under realistic news. RFC Bench operates at the paragraph level and captures the contextual complexity of financial news where meaning emerges from dispersed cues. The benchmark defines two complementary tasks: reference free misinformation detection and comparison based diagnosis using paired original perturbed inputs. Experiments reveal a consistent pattern: performance is substantially stronger when comparative context is available, while reference free settings expose significant weaknesses, including unstable predictions and elevated invalid outputs. These results indicate that current models struggle to maintain coherent belief states without external grounding. By highlighting this gap, RFC Bench provides a structured testbed for studying reference free reasoning and advancing more reliable financial misinformation detection in real world settings.

Key facts. Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 33 of its 96 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 7 Jan 2026.

Builds on

33 of 96 references.

References · 33

  1. 2023Not what you've signed up for: Compromising Real-World LLM-Integrated Applications with Indirect Prompt Injectioncited by 1,443
  2. 2018FEVER: a large-scale dataset for Fact Extraction and VERificationcited by 1,375
  3. 2023BloombergGPT: A Large Language Model for Financecited by 939
  4. 2019Defending Against Neural Fake Newscited by 559
  5. 2020Fact or Fiction: Verifying Scientific Claimscited by 554
  6. 2019FinBERT: Financial Sentiment Analysis with Pre-trained Language Modelscited by 385
  7. 2017"Liar, Liar Pants on Fire": A New Benchmark Dataset for Fake News Detectioncited by 363
  8. 2018FakeNewsNet: A Data Repository with News Content, Social Context and Spatialtemporal Information for Studying Fake News on Social Mediacited by 285
  9. 2018Delete, Retrieve, Generate: A Simple Approach to Sentiment and Style Transfercited by 191
  10. 2023FinMem: A Performance-Enhanced LLM Trading Agent with Layered Memory and Character Designcited by 164
  11. 2020FinBERT: A Pretrained Language Model for Financial Communicationscited by 161
  12. 2021COVID-Fact: Fact Extraction and Verification of Real-World Claims on COVID-19 Pandemiccited by 100
21 more
  1. 2020CoAID: COVID-19 Healthcare Misinformation Datasetcited by 84
  2. 2019Transforming Delete, Retrieve, Generate Approach for Controlled Text Style Transfercited by 81
  3. 2021Tailor: Generating and Perturbing Text with Semantic Controlscited by 68
  4. 2024MMFakeBench: A Mixed-Source Multimodal Misinformation Detection Benchmark for LVLMscited by 61
  5. 2018A Retrospective Analysis of the Fake News Challenge Stance Detection Taskcited by 49
  6. 2023Check-COVID: Fact-Checking COVID-19 News Claims with Scientific Evidencecited by 25
  7. 2023Fin-Fact: A Benchmark Dataset for Multimodal Financial Fact Checking and Explanation Generationcited by 25
  8. 2024A Survey on Natural Language Counterfactual Generationcited by 21
  9. 2024FinDVer: Explainable Claim Verification over Long and Hybrid-Content Financial Documentscited by 19
  10. 2024Large Language Models for Automated Literature Review: An Evaluation of Reference Generation, Abstract Writing, and Review Compositioncited by 17
  11. 2024Web Retrieval Agents for Evidence-Based Misinformation Detectioncited by 13
  12. 2024A Guide to Misinformation Detection Data and Evaluationcited by 10
  13. 2025VLDBench Evaluating Multimodal Disinformation with Regulatory Alignmentcited by 9
  14. 2023Investigating Online Financial Misinformation and Its Consequences: A Computational Perspectivecited by 8
  15. 2025Beyond Pointwise Scores: Decomposed Criteria-Based Evaluation of LLM Responsescited by 8
  16. 2025MMM-Fact: A Multimodal, Multi-Domain Fact-Checking Dataset with Multi-Level Retrieval Difficultycited by 5
  17. 2025Towards Unified Multimodal Misinformation Detection in Social Media: A Benchmark Dataset and Baselinecited by 4
  18. 2025Consistency Is the Key: Detecting Hallucinations in LLM Generated Text By Checking Inconsistencies About Key Factscited by 4
  19. 2023Domain-Expanded ASTE: Rethinking Generalization in Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extractioncited by 3
  20. 2025A New Dataset and Benchmark for Grounding Multimodal Misinformationcited by 2
  21. 2025FISCAL: Financial Synthetic Claim-document Augmented Learning for Efficient Fact-Checkingcited by 2

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 4.

4 papers.

  1. 2026Fact4ac at the Financial Misinformation Detection Challenge Task: Reference-Free Financial Misinformation Detection via Fine-Tuning and Few-Shot Prompting of Large Language Modelscited by 0
  2. 2026Frontier Financial Judgement: Can agents tell what might move a stock?cited by 0
  3. 2026Mint-Agent: Introducing Finance-Native Agentic Foundation Modelscited by 0
  4. 2026One AI Signal, Many Human Judgments: A Bayesian Cascade Analysis of AI-based Credibility Indicators in Online Information Spreadcited by 0