Don't `Well, Actually' Me Unless You Know What You're Talking About: Weak Presupposition Verification Degrades General QA Performance
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Abstract (arXiv)
False-presupposition QA (FPQA) tests LLMs on their ability to identify false presuppositions in questions and abstain or correct them rather than reinforcing false assumptions. The common approach reduces the task to prompting LLMs to extract presuppositions and fact checking each presupposition. While the performance on dedicated benchmarks keeps improving, evaluation largely focuses on questions with false presuppositions (FPQs) while ignoring the performance on ``normal'' questions (TPQs). Since many benchmarks over-represent FPQs compared to their natural occurrence, the result is that performance on these benchmarks doesn't reflect real-world QA performance. Through extensive experiments across various model families, sizes, and benchmarks, we show that methods that perform better on FPQs tend to perform worse on TPQs. Our analysis reveals this is the result of weak fact checking modules that reject also true presuppositions. We hope our findings will help guide future work toward FPQA methods that generalize well to realistic settings.
Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 22 of its 29 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 6 Aug 2026.
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22 of 29 references.
References · 22
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- 2025The Alternative Annotator Test for LLM-as-a-Judge: How to Statistically Justify Replacing Human Annotators with LLMscited by 72
- 2022CREPE: Open-Domain Question Answering with False Presuppositionscited by 70
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- 2023Won't Get Fooled Again: Answering Questions with False Premisescited by 47
- 2021Which Linguist Invented the Lightbulb? Presupposition Verification for Question-Answeringcited by 41
- 2025Trust Me, I'm Wrong: LLMs Hallucinate with Certainty Despite Knowing the Answercited by 26
- 2023Enhancing Large Language Models Against Inductive Instructions with Dual-critique Promptingcited by 21
- 2024Accounting for Sycophancy in Language Model Uncertainty Estimationcited by 18
10 more
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- 2024KG-FPQ: Evaluating Factuality Hallucination in LLMs with Knowledge Graph-based False Premise Questionscited by 9
- 2025Can LLMs Ground when they (Don't) Know: A Study on Direct and Loaded Political Questionscited by 9
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- 2026Accommodation and Epistemic Vigilance: A Pragmatic Account of Why LLMs Fail to Challenge Harmful Beliefscited by 8
- 2024Syn-QA2: Evaluating False Assumptions in Long-tail Questions with Synthetic QA Datasetscited by 5
- 2023PreWoMe: Exploiting Presuppositions as Working Memory for Long Form Question Answeringcited by 4
- 2026Two Axes of LLM Abstention: Answer Correctness and Question Answerabilitycited by 4
- 2026PhantomBench: Benchmarking the Non-existential Threat of Language Modelscited by 1
- 2026Legal LLM Hallucination Should Be Evaluated as Failure of Legal Warrantcited by 1
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