Do Factuality Methods Make LLMs More Factual? Reproducibility and Fair Comparison
Organizations: Factiverse AS · University of Stavanger · Stockholm University · TU Delft
Abstract
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.
Figures & tables
| Quantity | Paper | Ours | |
| Flame | |||
| Bio FActScore, | 47.9 | 54.2 | ✓ |
| AlpacaEval win rate vs. SFT DPO | 51.2 | 37.7 | ✗ |
| FactAlign , | |||
| released checkpoint vs. base, paired | — | ✓ | |
| our three-iteration run vs. its baseline | ✗ | ||
| Method | Acc. | Abst. | Acc att. | F |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SimpleQA ( ) | ||||
| base (untrained) | .034 | .812 | .181 | .057 |
| Flame | .032 | .851 | .215 | .056 |
| FactAlign | .032 | .813 | .171 | .054 |
| KnowRL | .032 | .822 | .180 | .054 |
| FactGRPO | .052 | .414 | .089 | .066 |
| VeriScore | VeriScore + Relevance | ||||||||
| Method | #Claims | #Sup. | P | R | F1 | #Sup. | P | R | F1 |
| Biography ( , ) | |||||||||
| base (untrained) | 27.6 | 12.0 | 0.351 | 0.472 | 0.370 | 10.6 | 0.283 | 0.434 | 0.325 |
| Flame | 23.5 | 10.6 | 0.338 | 0.436 † | 0.356 † | 9.7 | 0.294 | 0.407 † | 0.324 |
| FactAlign | 27.1 | 11.7 | 0.343 | 0.468 | 0.368 | 10.4 | 0.284 | 0.431 | 0.326 |
| KnowRL | 29.8 | 11.3 | 0.281 † | 0.440 † | 0.325 † | 10.0 | 0.237 † | 0.409 † | 0.291 † |
Appendix figures & tables26 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Llama-2 70B | Bio | A-Fact | FAVA | Win% |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SFT | 53.9 | 44.3 | 54.7 | 26.1 |
| SFT + DPO | 51.6 | 43.7 | 51.5 | 50.0 |
| Sft | 54.6 | 45.5 | 54.2 | 19.3 |
| Flame | 54.2 | 46.2 | 50.9 | 37.7 |
| Method | Code | Training data | Checkpoints | Reward or judge | Released code vs. paper |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Flame | ✗ | prompts only; SFT and DPO data are self-generated | ✗ | reward models ✗ | no code to compare |
| FactAlign | ✓ | self-generated; general-domain mixture? | ✓ | SAFE pipeline ✓ | evaluates a LongFact variant regenerated in 2026, which offsets every absolute number by about 19 points |
| KnowRL | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | API judge, snapshot drifts | cold-start stage via LLaMA-Factory with the released data; the released RL configuration sets learning rate and rank 128 where the paper gives and 256, with the base model left as a placeholder; the fact reward receives the response without its opening reasoning tag |
| FactGRPO | ✓ | SFT data ✓; RL prompts recovered from the DPO pairs (3,706 of 4k) | ? | programmatic ( VeriScore ) ✓ | in the released configuration |
| Faith | ✓ | ✓, with the estimator’s predicted state in every prompt | ? | reward model trained from released code | one epoch for the reward model instead of two and 0.45 PPO epochs instead of about two in the Llama-3 configurations; the rectifier ships a Mistral configuration but no training data (provided by the authors on request) and no Llama-3 configuration |
| Llama-3-8B-Inst. | FactAlign | |
|---|---|---|
| claims | 46.00 | 45.22 |
| supported | 30.54 | 32.39 |
| not supported | 14.71 | 11.98 |
| precision | 0.675 | 0.730 |
| 0.4145 | 0.4413 |
| Run | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| KnowRL , end to end | 0.2 | 0.2 | 0.1 | 0.2 | 0.2 |
| KnowRL-Zero , paper hyperparameters | 7.2 | 14.2 | 33.7 | 93.1 | 96.8 |
| + repaired fact input | 7.4 | 15.2 | 82.2 | 98.3 | 98.3 |
| released hyperparameters, raw model | 65.2 | 99.6 | 99.9 | 100.0 | 100.0 |
| released hyperparameters, after cold start | 0.9 | 15.7 | 85.2 | 99.2 | 98.4 |
| Base distill | KnowRL | |
| Reported accuracy | 1.92 | 4.56 |
| our measurement | 2.00 | 5.71 |
| Rejected | 10.2% | 93.0% |
| Correct answers, of 500 | 9 | 2 |
| Method | Acc. | Abst. | Acc att. | F |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SimpleQA ( ) | ||||
| without the relevance term | .053 | .401 | .088 | .066 |
| full reward | .052 | .414 | .089 | .066 |
| TruthfulQA ( ) | ||||
| without the relevance term | .237 | .355 | .368 | .289 |
| full reward | .231 | .368 | .366 | .284 |
| Paper | Ours | |
| Base model | Llama-3.1-8B-Inst. | same |
| SFT data | 3k synthetic | their released 3k |
| RL prompts | 4k synthetic | 3,706 recovered |
| Rollouts | 4 | 4 |
| Learning rate | 1e-6 | 1e-6 |
| Objective | Dr. GRPO | Dr. GRPO |
| Biography | Alpaca-Fact | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Base | 35.8 | 12.1 | 61.9 | 20.0 |
| our GRPO | 36.9 | 10.9 | 64.7 | 18.1 |
| Paper, base | 25.9 | 10.3 | 60.2 | 30.7 |
| Paper, GRPO | 47.1 | 14.8 | 79.7 | 36.9 |
| VS | VS+Rel | ||||||||
| Method | #Claims | #Sup. | P | R | F1 | #Sup. | P | R | F1 |
| Biography ( , ) | |||||||||
| without the relevance term | 25.6 | 10.5 | 0.360 | 0.480 | 0.399 | 9.4 | 0.316 | 0.438 | 0.357 |
| full reward | 25.4 | 10.1 | 0.342 | 0.466 | 0.384 | 9.1 | 0.301 | 0.424 | 0.343 |
| Alpaca-Fact ( , ) | |||||||||
| without the relevance term | 26.5 | 18.2 | 0.631 | 0.699 | 0.638 | 13.4 | 0.471 | 0.573 | 0.491 |
| SFT | SFT PPO | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dataset | Est. | Read | Est. | Read | Agree |
| NQ-Open | .297 | .303 | .295 | .298 | 83.2% |
| SciQ | .585 | .584 | .598 | .591 | 84.1% |
| TriviaQA | .662 | .662 | .659 | .658 | 90.1% |
| WebQuestions | .342 | .341 | .347 | .346 | 82.6% |
| overall | 87.5% | ||||
| Ours, precision | Full system | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dataset | Sft | Faith | ||
| TriviaQA | 74.15 | 73.56 | ||
| SciQ | 65.74 | 67.13 | ||
| NQ-Open | 42.51 | 42.57 | ||
| WebQuestions | 43.27 | 43.74 | ||
| Mean | ||||
| Method | Acc. | Abst. | Acc att. | F |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SimpleQA ( ) | ||||
| base (untrained) | .034 | .812 | .181 | .057 |
| Flame | .029 | .860 | .207 | .051 |
| KnowRL | .029 | .831 | .172 | .050 |
| FactGRPO | .054 | .416 | .092 | .068 |
| Faith | .046 | .001 | .046 | .046 |
| Method | Sent. | Prec. | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Biography ( , ) | |||||
| base (untrained) | 13.6 | 12.02 | 15.60 | .351 | .370 |
| Flame | 11.6 | 10.30 | 12.35 | .334 | .349 |
| KnowRL | 16.0 | 11.33 | 19.31 | .270 | .316 |
| FactGRPO | 12.7 | 10.33 | 15.15 | .353 | .394 |
| Faith | 1.0 | 0.39 | 0.21 | .373 | .037 |
| Method | Acc. | Abst. | Acc att. | F |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SimpleQA ( ) | ||||
| Faith SFT | .055 | .001 | .055 | .055 |
| Faith SFT + state | .046 | .001 | .046 | .046 |
| Faith full | .058 | .001 | .058 | .058 |
| Faith full + state | .049 | .000 | .049 | .049 |
| TruthfulQA ( ) | ||||
| Method | Sent. | Prec. | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Biography ( , ) | |||||
| Faith SFT | 1.0 | 0.54 | 0.24 | .446 | .050 |
| Faith SFT + state | 1.0 | 0.39 | 0.21 | .374 | .037 |
| Faith full | 1.0 | 0.52 | 0.22 | .444 | .048 |
| Faith full + state | 1.0 | 0.39 | 0.21 | .377 | .037 |
| Alpaca-Fact ( , ) | |||||
| Reward | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Generations | Flame | FactAlign | KnowRL | FactGRPO | Faith |
| base (untrained) | |||||
| Flame | † | † | † | † | |
| FactAlign | † | ||||
| KnowRL | † | ||||
| FactGRPO | † | † | † | † | † |
| gpt-4o | gpt-oss-120b | |||
| Method | Acc. | F | Acc. | F |
| SimpleQA ( ) | ||||
| base (untrained) | .034 | .057 | .030 | .051 |
| Flame | .032 | .056 | .030 | .052 |
| FactAlign | .032 | .054 | .029 | .049 |
| KnowRL | .032 | .054 | .031 | .052 |
| Question | Response ( <answer> span) | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Tell me a bio of Diego Suarez (garden designer). | I’m not sure if I have any information on a garden designer by the name of Diego Suarez. However, I can provide some general information about garden designers … Garden designers are professionals who design and plan gardens, taking into account factors such as the climate, soil type, and desired aesthetic. … Some well-known garden designers include Gertrude Jekyll, Russell Page, and Piet Oudolf. … I apologize, but I don’t have any information on a garden designer by the name of Diego Suarez. | 0.00 | 0.93 |
| Tell me a bio of Shaolin (humorist). | I’m not sure if I have any information about a well-known humorist by the name of Shaolin. However, I can provide some general information about the Shaolin Temple in China … The Shaolin Temple is located in Dengfeng, Henan Province, China … has a rich history that dates back to the 5th century, and it’s been a major center of Buddhist learning … particularly Shaolin Kung Fu … | 0.00 | 0.84 |
| Tell me a bio of Alexandre Hohagen. | Alexandre Hohagen is a name that combines a French first name with a German surname. The name Alexandre is derived from the Greek name Alexander , which means “defender of the people.” The surname Hohagen is of German origin … Unfortunately, I don’t have any specific information about a person named Alexandre Hohagen. … | 0.00 | 0.75 |
| Tell me a bio of Kubota Beisen. | I’m not familiar with a well-known artist by the name of Kubota Beisen. … However, I can provide some general information about Japanese art and artists from the same time period . The Edo period (1603–1868) and the Meiji period (1868–1912) were significant periods in Japanese art history … Some notable Japanese artists from these periods include Hokusai … Hiroshige … and Yokoyama Taikan … | 0.00 | 0.74 |
| Tell me a bio of Rangi Te Kanawa. | Rangi Te Kanawa is a New Zealand singer, but I couldn’t find much information about their background … you might be thinking of Kiri Te Kanawa . Kiri Te Kanawa is a prominent New Zealand soprano … She was born in 1944 in Gisborne, New Zealand … and has since performed with many major opera companies … including the Metropolitan Opera in New York and the Royal Opera in London. … | 0.00 | 0.67 |
| (biography / Alpaca-Fact) | |||||
| Method | 5 / 7 | 14 / 15 | 20 / 18 | 23 / 21 | 29 / 24 |
| Biography ( ) | |||||
| base | .442 | .398 | .371 | .357 | .331 |
| Flame | .435 | .394 | .367 | .353 | .326 |
| FactAlign | .427 | .384 | .357 | .342 | .315 |
| KnowRL | .421 | .378 | .350 | .336 | .311 |
| Question | Response claims | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| Tell me a bio of Mindy Smith. | [ FactGRPO ] ✗ Mindy Smith has released several singles throughout her career. Below is a list of some of her notable releases: • - “One Moment More” • - “It’s That Time Again” • - “Come to Jesus” • Mindy Smith has been performing at festivals and venues across the United States. … | VeriScore extracts bare song titles as check-worthy claims and labels them supported. |
| Tell me a bio of Jessie Mae Brown Beavers. | [ FactAlign ] ✗ Jessie Mae Brown Beavers was active in the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi. • Jessie Mae Brown Beavers was a community leader. • Jessie Mae Brown Beavers was an community leader. • Jessie Mae Brown Beavers was an activist. … | Near-duplicate claims are each counted as separately supported, inflating the factuality score. |
| Tell me a bio of Diego Suarez (garden designer). | [ FactGRPO ] • Garden designers design and plan gardens. • Garden designers consider the climate when designing gardens. • Garden designers consider the soil type when designing gardens. • Garden designers aim to achieve a desired aesthetic in their designs. … | Generic filler claims are factually supported but irrelevant to the question. FactGRPO exploits such claims to hack the reward (Table 21 ). |
| Web search | Wikipedia | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Method | #Claims | #Sup. | P | #Sup. | P | Agree. |
| Biography ( ) | ||||||
| base (untrained) | 27.6 | 12.0 | .351 | 5.5 | .140 | .729 |
| Flame | 23.6 | 10.6 | .338 | 5.1 | .149 | .729 |
| FactAlign | 27.1 | 11.7 | .344 | 5.5 | .141 | .734 |
| KnowRL | 29.8 | 11.3 | .281 † | 5.1 | .116 † | .760 |
| Agr. | |||
| Web support vs. VeriScore | |||
| first annotator | 261 | .797 | .58 |
| second annotator | 289 | .751 | .49 |
| between annotators | 261 | .778 | .50 |
| consensus | 203 | .842 | .65 |
| Relevance vs. LLM labels | |||
| Method | Base models | Evaluation data | Factuality metric |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flame ( Lin et al., 2024 ) | Llama-2 7B, 70B | Bio ( Min et al., 2023 ) , Alpaca-Fact ( Lin et al., 2024 ) , FAVA ( Mishra et al., 2024 ) | FActScore (Inst-LLAMA npm) |
| TruthfulQA ( Lin et al., 2022 ) , AlpacaEval ( Dubois et al., 2024 ) | BLEU/ROUGE; GPT-4 win rate | ||
| FactAlign ( Huang and Chen, 2024 ) | gemma-2b, Llama-3-8B , Phi3-Mini | LongFact-Objects ( Wei et al., 2024b ) | SAFE F1@100 (ColBERT) |
| FActScore biographies ( Min et al., 2023 ) | FActScore (GPT-3.5 assessor) | ||
| KnowRL ( Ren et al., 2026 ) | R1-Distill-Qwen-7B, Skywork-OR1-7B | SimpleQA ( Wei et al., 2024a ) , ChineseSimpleQA ( He et al., 2025 ) | accuracy, non-rejected only |
| TruthfulQA ( Lin et al., 2022 ) , GPQA ( Rein et al., 2024 ) , AIME | BLEU; accuracy |
| Method | Training stages | Signal | What it optimizes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flame | factuality-aware SFT factuality-aware DPO | implicit | preference pairs scored with FActScore against retrieval |
| FactAlign | fKTO, from an instruction-tuned checkpoint that supplies the supervised stage | implicit | : response-level KTO plus sentence-level labels |
| KnowRL | cold-start SFT GRPO | rule | format , plus an LLM verdict , plus FActScore partial credit when wrong and not a refusal |
| FactGRPO | SFT (3k) Dr. GRPO | rule | if malformed, else , with , ; , from VeriScore |
| Faith | estimator SFT reward model PPO RAG rectifier (RAFT) | learned | a Llama-3-8B reward model with a scalar value head, trained to predict the EM_RP containment score |
LLM Alignment
Large language model alignment studies methods for making models follow human intentions, values, and safety constraints across contexts.
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