Atomic Consistency Preference Optimization for Long-Form Question Answering

Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate factually inaccurate content even if they have corresponding knowledge, which critically undermines their reliability. Existing approaches attempt to mitigate this by incorporating uncertainty in QA prompt during training, but these numerical scores lack the semantic richness for LLM to properly understand its internal states of trustworthiness and honestness, leading to insufficient factuality alignment. We introduce FAITH (Factuality Alignment through Integrating Trustworthiness and Honestness), a post-training framework for factuality alignment that integrates natural-language uncertainty signals with external knowledge. Specifically, we augment training datasets by computing confidence scores and semantic entropy from LLM outputs and mapping them into a knowledge state quadrant that describes the model's internal knowledge possession (trustworthiness) and answering behaviors (honestness) in natural language. Based on this enhanced data, we design a reward function that considers both correctness and uncertainty signals, and fine-tune the LLM using the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm. To further mitigate weakly grounded responses, we design a retrieval-augmented module that retrieves relevant external passages, improving the consistency between internal and external knowledge representations. Extensive experiments on four knowledge-intensive benchmarks demonstrate that FAITH enhances the factual accuracy and truthfulness of LLMs.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are aligned to human preferences, after pre-training and supervised fine-tuning steps. However, standard RL alignment steps such as RLHF do not focus on factuality of LLMs, hence they may generate non-factual information, which could result in unintended consequences. In response, a number of factuality alignment approaches have been proposed in the literature which claim to improve factuality of LLMs on their own benchmarks. However, these methods have not been reproduced independently and are also not comparable since each uses a different base model, training data, evaluation set, judge, and metric. In this paper, we present the first independent reproduction of five factuality alignment methods, which span on-policy RL (PPO, GRPO, and Dr.~GRPO) and offline preference optimization (DPO and KTO), and compare them on a common benchmark with common evaluation metrics. We found that none of these methods reproduces in full, and on the common benchmark none of the methods significantly outperforms the base model. On closer inspection, the rewards optimize for format, length, or brevity rather than factuality and relevance, whereas the choice between on-policy and offline training matters little. Furthermore, the evaluation metrics and benchmarks are also part of the problem since they do not measure relevance of text to the prompt. Since there is no ground truth associated with the prompts, the reliance on LLM judges and retrieval for verification also makes the evaluation fragile. We release our code, data, and checkpoints.

Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently hallucinate, limiting their reliability in critical applications. Conformal Prediction (CP) addresses this by calibrating error rates on held-out data to provide statistically valid confidence guarantees. Recent work extends CP to LLM factuality to filter out risky claims, ensuring that hallucination rates remain below a user-specified level (e.g., 10%). While prior methods treat claims independently, Coherent Factuality extends to multi-step reasoning by representing outputs as dependency graphs and jointly validating claims with their logical ancestors. A key limitation is that Coherent Factuality is not differentiable, requiring hand-crafted scorers that at high reliability levels remove nearly 60% of true claims. We introduce Differentiable Coherent Factuality (DCF), a fully differentiable relaxation that enables learning improved scorers while provably recovering the original algorithm's guarantees. Experiments on two benchmark reasoning datasets demonstrate DCF achieves up to 141% improvement in claim retention while maintaining reliability guarantees, representing a significant step towards reliable conformal LLM systems.