Mark Rothermel

Quentin Delfosse, Sebastian Sztwiertnia, Mark Rothermel et al.

Goal misalignment, reward sparsity and difficult credit assignment are only a few of the many issues that make it difficult for deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents to learn optimal policies. Unfortunately, the black-box nature of deep neural networks impedes the inclusion of domain experts for inspecting the model and revising suboptimal policies. To this end, we introduce *Successive Concept Bottleneck Agents* (SCoBots), that integrate consecutive concept bottleneck (CB) layers. In contrast to current CB models, SCoBots do not just represent concepts as properties of individual objects, but also as relations between objects which is crucial for many RL tasks. Our experimental results provide evidence of SCoBots' competitive performances, but also of their potential for domain experts to understand and regularize their behavior. Among other things, SCoBots enabled us to identify a previously unknown misalignment problem in the iconic video game, Pong, and resolve it. Overall, SCoBots thus result in more human-aligned RL agents. Our code is available at https://github.com/k4ntz/SCoBots .

Mark Rothermel, Marcus Kornmann, Marcus Rohrbach et al.

The growing scale of online misinformation urgently demands Automated Fact-Checking (AFC). Existing benchmarks for evaluating AFC systems, however, are largely limited in terms of task scope, modalities, domain, language diversity, realism, or coverage of misinformation types. Critically, they are static, thus subject to data leakage as their claims enter the pretraining corpora of LLMs. As a result, benchmark performance no longer reliably reflects the actual ability to verify claims. We introduce Verified Theses and Statements (VeriTaS), the first dynamic benchmark for multimodal AFC, designed to remain robust under ongoing large-scale pretraining of foundation models. VeriTaS currently comprises 24,000 real-world claims from 108 professional fact-checking organizations across 54 languages, covering textual and audiovisual content. Claims are added quarterly via a fully automated seven-stage pipeline that normalizes claim formulation, retrieves original media, and maps heterogeneous expert verdicts to a novel, standardized, and disentangled scoring scheme with textual justifications. Through human evaluation, we demonstrate that the automated annotations closely match human judgments. We commit to update VeriTaS in the future, establishing a leakage-resistant benchmark, supporting meaningful AFC evaluation in the era of rapidly evolving foundation models. We will make the code and data publicly available.

Tobias Braun, Mark Rothermel, Marcus Rohrbach et al.

The proliferation of disinformation demands reliable and scalable fact-checking solutions. We present Dynamic Evidence-based FAct-checking with Multimodal Experts (DEFAME), a modular, zero-shot MLLM pipeline for open-domain, text-image claim verification. DEFAME operates in a six-stage process, dynamically selecting the tools and search depth to extract and evaluate textual and visual evidence. Unlike prior approaches that are text-only, lack explainability, or rely solely on parametric knowledge, DEFAME performs end-to-end verification, accounting for images in claims and evidence while generating structured, multimodal reports. Evaluation on the popular benchmarks VERITE, AVerITeC, and MOCHEG shows that DEFAME surpasses all previous methods, establishing itself as the new state-of-the-art fact-checking system for uni- and multimodal fact-checking. Moreover, we introduce a new multimodal benchmark, ClaimReview2024+, featuring claims after the knowledge cutoff of GPT-4o, avoiding data leakage. Here, DEFAME drastically outperforms the GPT-4o baselines, showing temporal generalizability and the potential for real-time fact-checking.