Automatic fact-checking has recently received more attention as a means of combating misinformation. Despite significant advancements, fact-checking systems based on retrieval-augmented language models still struggle to tackle adversarial claims, which are intentionally designed by humans to challenge fact-checking systems. To address these challenges, we propose a training-free method designed to rephrase the original claim, making it easier to locate supporting evidence. Our modular framework, SUCEA, decomposes the task into three steps: 1) Claim Segmentation and Decontextualization that segments adversarial claims into independent sub-claims; 2) Iterative Evidence Retrieval and Claim Editing that iteratively retrieves evidence and edits the subclaim based on the retrieved evidence; 3) Evidence Aggregation and Label Prediction that aggregates all retrieved evidence and predicts the entailment label. Experiments on two challenging fact-checking datasets demonstrate that our framework significantly improves on both retrieval and entailment label accuracy, outperforming four strong claim-decomposition-based baselines.
View on arXiv@article{liu2025_2506.04583,
title={ SUCEA: Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval for Adversarial Fact-checking through Claim Decomposition and Editing },
author={ Hongjun Liu and Yilun Zhao and Arman Cohan and Chen Zhao },
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.04583},
year={ 2025 }
}