# Distill and Align Decomposition for Enhanced Claim Verification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21857 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.21857/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 21 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [Understanding R1-Zero-Like Training: A Critical Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20783/) (2025)
- [FActScore: Fine-grained Atomic Evaluation of Factual Precision in Long Form Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14251/) (2023)
- [MiniCheck: Efficient Fact-Checking of LLMs on Grounding Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10774/) (2024)
- [Factuality Challenges in the Era of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05189/) (2023)
- [WiCE: Real-World Entailment for Claims in Wikipedia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01432/) (2023)
- [VERISCORE: Evaluating the factuality of verifiable claims in long-form text generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19276/) (2024)
- [Beyond Binary Rewards: Training LMs to Reason About Their Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16806/) (2025)
- [HalluLens: LLM Hallucination Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.17550/) (2025)
- [Molecular Facts: Desiderata for Decontextualization in LLM Fact Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.20079/) (2024)
- [A Closer Look at Claim Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11903/) (2024)
- [Decomposition Dilemmas: Does Claim Decomposition Boost or Burden Fact-Checking Performance?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02400/) (2024)
- [DnDScore: Decontextualization and Decomposition for Factuality Verification in Long-Form Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13175/) (2024)
- [Verifying the Verifiers: Unveiling Pitfalls and Potentials in Fact Verifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13342/) (2025)
- [VeriFact: Enhancing Long-Form Factuality Evaluation with Refined Fact Extraction and Reference Facts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09701/) (2025)
- [Optimizing Decomposition for Optimal Claim Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15354/) (2025)
- [VeriFastScore: Speeding up long-form factuality evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16973/) (2025)

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

- [A Large-Scale Multi-Dimensional Empirical Study of LLMs for Conversation Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15974/) (2026)
- [CREDENCE: Claim Reduction for Decomposition & Enhanced Credibility -- Semantic Metrics and Convergence Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19819/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Complex claim verification requires decomposing sentences into verifiable subclaims, yet existing methods struggle to align decomposition quality with verification performance. We propose a reinforcement learning (RL) approach that jointly optimizes decomposition quality and verifier alignment using Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Our method integrates: (i) structured sequential reasoning; (ii) supervised finetuning on teacher-distilled exemplars; and (iii) a multi-objective reward balancing format compliance, verifier alignment, and decomposition quality. Across six evaluation settings, our trained 8B decomposer improves downstream verification performance to (71.75%) macro-F1, outperforming prompt-based approaches ((+1.99), (+6.24)) and existing RL methods ((+5.84)). Human evaluation confirms the high quality of the generated subclaims. Our framework enables smaller language models to achieve state-of-the-art claim verification by jointly optimising for verification accuracy and decomposition quality.