2.4AIFeb 25
Distill and Align Decomposition for Enhanced Claim VerificationJabez Magomere, Elena Kochkina, Samuel Mensah et al.
Complex claim verification requires decomposing sentences into verifiable subclaims, yet existing methods struggle to align decomposition quality with verification performance. We propose a reinforcement learning (RL) approach that jointly optimizes decomposition quality and verifier alignment using Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Our method integrates: (i) structured sequential reasoning; (ii) supervised finetuning on teacher-distilled exemplars; and (iii) a multi-objective reward balancing format compliance, verifier alignment, and decomposition quality. Across six evaluation settings, our trained 8B decomposer improves downstream verification performance to (71.75%) macro-F1, outperforming prompt-based approaches ((+1.99), (+6.24)) and existing RL methods ((+5.84)). Human evaluation confirms the high quality of the generated subclaims. Our framework enables smaller language models to achieve state-of-the-art claim verification by jointly optimising for verification accuracy and decomposition quality.
15.5AIApr 22
Deep FinResearch Bench: Evaluating AI's Ability to Conduct Professional Financial Investment ResearchMirazul Haque, Antony Papadimitriou, Samuel Mensah et al.
We introduce Deep FinResearch Bench, a practical and comprehensive evaluation framework for deep research (DR) agents in financial investment research. The benchmark assesses three dimensions of report quality: qualitative rigor, quantitative forecasting and valuation accuracy, and claim credibility and verifiability. Particularly, we define corresponding qualitative and quantitative evaluation metrics and implement an automated scoring procedure to enable scalable assessment. Applying the benchmark to financial reports from frontier DR agents and comparing them with reports authored by financial professionals, we find that AI-generated reports still fall short across these dimensions. These findings underscore the need for domain-specialized DR agents tailored to finance, and we hope the work establishes a foundation for standardized benchmarking of DR agents in financial research.