# ToE: A Hierarchical and Explainable Claim Verification Framework with Dynamic Multi-source Evidence Retrieval and Aggregation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.27736 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.27736/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 18 of its 23 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Jun 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/lr/reasoning-benchmarks-and-evaluation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04761/) (2023)
- [gpt-oss-120b & gpt-oss-20b Model Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10925/) (2025)
- [DeepSeek-V3.2: Pushing the Frontier of Open Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02556/) (2025)
- ["Liar, Liar Pants on Fire": A New Benchmark Dataset for Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.00648/) (2017)
- [PoisonedRAG: Knowledge Corruption Attacks to Retrieval-Augmented Generation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07867/) (2024)
- [Poisoning Retrieval Corpora by Injecting Adversarial Passages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19156/) (2023)
- [SIMILAR: Submodular Information Measures Based Active Learning In Realistic Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00717/) (2021)
- [GEO: Generative Engine Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09735/) (2023)
- [Fighting Fire with Fire: The Dual Role of LLMs in Crafting and Detecting Elusive Disinformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15515/) (2023)
- [AFaCTA: Assisting the Annotation of Factual Claim Detection with Reliable LLM Annotators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11073/) (2024)
- [Check-COVID: Fact-Checking COVID-19 News Claims with Scientific Evidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18265/) (2023)
- [FakeGPT: Fake News Generation, Explanation and Detection of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05046/) (2023)
- [Re-Search for The Truth: Multi-round Retrieval-augmented Large Language Models are Strong Fake News Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09747/) (2024)
- [TELLER: A Trustworthy Framework for Explainable, Generalizable and Controllable Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07776/) (2024)
- [Robust Fake News Detection using Large Language Models under Adversarial Sentiment Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.15277/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The rapid spread of fake news poses increasing threats to information ecosystems, especially as AI-generated misinformation under Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) poisoning allows adversarially crafted content to be systematically surfaced by retrieval systems, contaminating LLM reasoning. In this paper, we propose Tree of Evidence (ToE), a hierarchical evidence reasoning framework for automated fact-checking that models each claim as a dynamically expanding argument tree. ToE integrates a reinforcement learning-driven multi-source retrieval agent, an evidence evaluation agent, and an argument tree aggregation algorithm to iteratively decompose, retrieve, and verify claims through an explainable evidence chain. We further provide a theoretical analysis of the retrieval process, deriving a formal error bound that guarantees the learned policy converges to a neighborhood of the information-theoretically optimal policy. Experiments across multiple datasets and backbone LLMs demonstrate that ToE achieves improvements ranging from 4 to 24 percentage points over competitive baselines, with particularly pronounced gains on adversarially poisoned inputs.