Reasoning Paths as Signals: Augmenting Multi-hop Fact Verification through Structural Reasoning Progression (2506.07075v1)

Abstract: The growing complexity of factual claims in real-world scenarios presents significant challenges for automated fact verification systems, particularly in accurately aggregating and reasoning over multi-hop evidence. Existing approaches often rely on static or shallow models that fail to capture the evolving structure of reasoning paths, leading to fragmented retrieval and limited interpretability. To address these issues, we propose a Structural Reasoning framework for Multi-hop Fact Verification that explicitly models reasoning paths as structured graphs throughout both evidence retrieval and claim verification stages. Our method comprises two key modules: a structure-enhanced retrieval mechanism that constructs reasoning graphs to guide evidence collection, and a reasoning-path-guided verification module that incrementally builds subgraphs to represent evolving inference trajectories. We further incorporate a structure-aware reasoning mechanism that captures long-range dependencies across multi-hop evidence chains, enabling more precise verification. Extensive experiments on the FEVER and HoVer datasets demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms strong baselines, highlighting the effectiveness of reasoning-path modeling in enhancing retrieval precision and verification accuracy.

Overview of "Reasoning Paths as Signals: Augmenting Multi-hop Fact Verification through Structural Reasoning Progression"

The paper "Reasoning Paths as Signals: Augmenting Multi-hop Fact Verification through Structural Reasoning Progression" addresses the increasing complexity involved in automated fact verification systems, particularly for multi-hop fact verification. This research problem arises due to the inadequacy of traditional models in accurately aggregating and reasoning over multi-hop evidence. The authors tackle these challenges by proposing a Structural Reasoning framework specifically designed for Multi-hop Fact Verification. This framework innovatively models reasoning paths as structured graphs in both evidence retrieval and claim verification phases.

Methodology and Key Contributions

The authors introduce a two-pronged approach: a structure-enhanced retrieval mechanism and a reasoning-path-guided verification module.

1. Structure-enhanced Retrieval: This component constructs reasoning graphs that guide evidence collection processes. The model goes beyond simple concatenation of evidence; it represents claims and evidence as a unified graph enabling fine-grained modeling of semantic, entity-level, and event-based dependencies.
2. Reasoning-path-guided Verification: This module incrementally builds subgraphs representing evolutionary reasoning trajectories. By constructing a series of evidence subgraphs, the proposed model can depict how information accrues over multi-hop evidence chains, capturing both local and global reasoning dynamics.

Furthermore, the paper employs GraphFormers, an advanced architecture extending the capabilities of traditional GNNs and Transformers. This approach ensures a deeper and more integrative handling of complex claims, thus enhancing both retrieval precision and verification accuracy.

Experimental Results

The framework demonstrated superior performance through extensive validation. It was tested on datasets such as FEVER and HoVer, common benchmarks for fact verification tasks. On both datasets, the proposed method consistently outperformed existing baseline models, which underscores its ability to manage multi-hop reasoning effectively.

In scenarios requiring complex multi-hop reasoning, such as in the HoVer dataset, the model exhibited a pronounced advantage. This was particularly evident when dealing with verification that required extensive inter-evidence reasoning paths, underscoring the impact of the proposed structural reasoning enhancements.

Implications and Future Work

The primary implications of this work are twofold. Practically, this research promises more reliable automated fact verification, critical in mitigating misinformation in digital spaces. Theoretically, it reinforces the significance of modeling structural reasoning paths explicitly, propelling further development of multi-hop reasoning models.

Looking ahead, future research could explore applying similar structural reasoning frameworks to related domains, such as knowledge graph refinement, and even outside the natural language processing field into other areas where reasoning over complex, structured data is critical. Moreover, extending the structural reasoning progression approach to handle a broader range of evidential types, including multimedia information, could be a promising direction to explore.

Overall, this paper contributes a methodologically robust approach to handling the intricate nature of multi-hop fact verification, underscoring the necessity of sophisticated structural modeling in the pursuit of advanced automated reasoning systems.