cs.CLApr 10, 2026

Case-Grounded Evidence Verification: A Framework for Constructing Evidence-Sensitive Supervision

Authors: Soroosh Tayebi Arasteh, Mehdi Joodaki, Mahshad Lotfinia, Sven Nebelung, Daniel Truhn

Organizations: RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

Abstract

Evidence-grounded reasoning requires more than attaching retrieved text to a prediction: a model should make decisions that depend on whether the provided evidence supports the target claim. In practice, this often fails because supervision is weak, evidence is only loosely tied to the claim, and evaluation does not test evidence dependence directly. We introduce case-grounded evidence verification, a general framework in which a model receives a local case context, external evidence, and a structured claim, and must decide whether the evidence supports the claim for that case. Our key contribution is a supervision construction procedure that generates explicit support examples together with semantically controlled non-support examples, including counterfactual wrong-state and topic-related negatives, without manual evidence annotation. We instantiate the framework in radiology and train a standard verifier on the resulting support task. The learned verifier substantially outperforms both case-only and evidence-only baselines, remains strong under correct evidence, and collapses when evidence is removed or swapped, indicating genuine evidence dependence. This behavior transfers across unseen evidence articles and an external case distribution, though performance degrades under evidence-source shift and remains sensitive to backbone choice. Overall, the results suggest that a major bottleneck in evidence grounding is not only model capacity, but the lack of supervision that encodes the causal role of evidence.

Figures & tables

Appendix figures & tables31 assets

Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.

Appendix

Explore similar work

CardsList
  1. Is This Evidence Decision-Critical? Learning to Verify Rule-Governed Decisions

    Sep 30, 2026Haoyang Zhang, Jianpeng Zhao, Qi Hao +1LLM Decision-Making

  2. Coverage-Controlled Preference Mining from Noisy Claim Verification for Evidence-Grounded Generation

    Mar 11, 2026Weixin Liu, Congning Ni, Qingyuan Song +4Claim VerificationHealthcare

  3. Evidence-RL: Towards Evidence-intensive Visual Reasoning

    Aug 8, 2026Haojie Huang, Xinlei Yu, Chengming Xu +6Vision-Language GroundingVisually Grounded Reasoning