Factual oracle verification

How it works

Where a reliable oracle exists — a structured database, a known-answer set built for the task, a citation or publication index — every discrete factual claim a model makes can be checked against it directly, rather than judged by a human's or another model's opinion. Applied to citation generation, this means resolving every claimed reference against the index it's supposedly drawn from and flagging anything that doesn't resolve, the single most direct test for fabricated citations. Applied to summarization or extraction, it means decomposing the output into individual factual assertions and checking each against the source it was generated from, rather than evaluating the summary's fluency or coverage as a whole.

When to use it

Factual QA and knowledge tasks with a checkable answer set, summarization-fidelity checks against a known source document, citation and reference generation, and retrieval-grounded answers where the source material itself functions as the oracle.

Limitations

Requires a trustworthy, sufficiently complete oracle to check against, which often doesn't exist for open-ended or subjective tasks — the method's coverage is bounded by the oracle's coverage, not by the full claim space of what the model might say.

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