PremiseCheck: Efficient Fact-Checking of Human and AI Peer Reviews
Organizations: Lehigh University · University of British Columbia · Vector Institute
Abstract
Peer review is under strain from the growth of submissions, and review comments written by humans or AI can misstate what a paper says. We introduce ReviewFact, a benchmark that labels such factual errors in review comments under one definition across NLP, machine learning, and the natural sciences, and that measures cost and latency alongside accuracy. A frontier LLM checks comments well but must read the whole paper for each check, while cheap decision models, which score whether a statement holds in a text, fall far short on whole comments that mix several implicit assertions. PremiseCheck is a framework that combines the two. An LLM rewrites each comment as explicit premises without reading the paper, and a decision model checks each premise against the paper. When each comment is checked on its own, PremiseCheck reaches accuracy comparable to GPT-5.5 across all three fields at about half its cost, and on NLP reviews at a quarter of its cost and less than half its latency.
Figures & tables
| NLP | Machine learning | Natural science | ||||||||
| Efficiency (%) | Efficiency (%) | Efficiency (%) | ||||||||
| System | Reasoning | AUROC | Cost | Time | AUROC | Cost | Time | AUROC | Cost | Time |
| Holistic judgment | ||||||||||
| GPT-5.5 (ref.) | medium | 63.2 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 66.9 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 67.8 | 100.0 | 100.0 |
| GPT-5.5 | low | 61.2 2.1 | 76.1 | 67.6 | 64.3 2.6 | 120.5 | 67.9 | 67.4 0.4 | 75.5 | 46.0 |
| GPT-5.5 | none | 49.3 14.0 | 49.9 | 28.4 | 66.5 0.4 | 95.7 | 26.1 | 63.7 4.1 | 54.2 | 13.7 |
Appendix figures & tables21 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Annotator 2 | ||||
| Annotator 1 | Factual | Judgment | Unclear | Total |
| Factual | 47 | 12 | 6 | 65 |
| Judgment | 5 | 70 | 5 | 80 |
| Unclear | 1 | 9 | 23 | 33 |
| Total | 53 | 91 | 34 | 178 |
| Cohen’s | Binary | Three-way | ||
| Step | Question |
|---|---|
| Route | Whether this statement is true can be decided from the content of the paper it refers to alone, without outside knowledge. |
| Verify (paper) | The proposition is true according to the paper. |
| Verify (knowledge) | The proposition is true. |
| Verify (natural science) ∗ | The paper contains information that contradicts the proposition. |
| Holistic | The review item’s main criticism is factually correct about the paper. |
| Paper-grounded premise | Knowledge premise | |
| 0 | The proposition is true according to the paper. | The proposition is true. |
| 1 | The paper states or clearly implies the proposition. | The proposition is correct. |
| 2 | A careful reader of the paper would accept the proposition as an accurate description of the paper. | The proposition is a true statement. |
| 3 | The proposition accurately describes the paper. | An expert in the field would agree with the proposition. |
| 4 | The paper supports the proposition. | The proposition is accurate. |
| 5 | The proposition is consistent with what the paper reports. | The proposition is factually correct. |
| Cost / comment | ||||||
| System | Reasoning | AUROC | $ | % | Latency (s) | AUROC [95% CI] |
| Holistic judgment | ||||||
| GPT-5.5 (ref.) | medium | 63.2 | $0.0217 | 100.0 | 6.27 | – |
| GPT-5.5 | low | 61.2 | $0.0165 | 76.1 | 4.23 | [ , ] |
| GPT-5.5 | none | 49.3 | $0.0108 | 49.9 | 1.78 | [ , ] |
| GPT-5.4-mini | low | 53.7 | $0.0021 | 9.8 | 1.95 | [ , ] |
| AUROC | AUROC [95% CI] | |||||
| Subset | Errors | Holistic GPT-5.5 | PremiseCheck | PremiseCheck holistic | Verifier | |
| PremiseCheck with Jev; verifier : Jev GPT-5.5 verifier | ||||||
| All | 6,466 | 308 | 63.2 | 63.0 | [ , ] | [ , ] |
| Human-written | 6,061 | 278 | 63.8 | 63.5 | [ , ] | [ , ] |
| AI-written | 405 | 30 | 64.9 | 63.1 | [ , ] | [ , ] |
| Without pilot sample | 6,272 | 208 | 62.1 | 63.3 | [ , ] | [ , ] |
| AUROC | ||||||
| Operation | Neg. | Jev | GPT-5.4-mini | GPT-5.5 | Jev GPT-5.5 [95% CI] | |
| Atomic operations | ||||||
| Check paper-grounded premise | 452 | 33 | 83.8 | 78.6 | 81.2 | [ , ] |
| Is a question answered in the paper? | 117 | 83 | 71.2 | 72.4 | 77.9 | [ , ] |
| Check knowledge premise | 481 | 21 | 79.8 | 74.6 | 81.4 | [ , ] |
| Route premise (paper vs. knowledge) | 972 | 499 | 82.3 | 78.7 | 81.5 | [ , ] |
| AUROC | Verifier [95% CI] | Cost / comment | Latency (s) | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Model | Holistic | Verifier | to reference | to Jev verifier | $ | % | Total | Verify |
| GPT-5.5 | 63.2 | 62.7 | [ , ] | [ , ] | 0.0678 | 312.7 | 12.06 | 7.38 |
| GPT-5.4-mini | 53.7 | 62.4 | [ , ] | [ , ] | 0.0156 | 71.9 | 6.90 | 2.21 |
| Jev | 49.9 | 63.0 | [ , ] | – | 0.0111 | 51.2 | 5.11 | 0.44 |
| Kev-27B | 54.3 | 63.0 | [ , ] | [ , ] | 0.0096 + GPU | 44.1 | – | – |
| API cost | GPU | [95% CI] | ||||
| System | Reasoning | AUROC | (%) | (s) | to reference | to Jev verifier |
| Holistic judgment | ||||||
| GPT-5.5 (ref.) | medium | 63.2 | 100.0 | – | – | – |
| MiniCheck-7B | – | 59.5 | 0 | 0.03 | [ , ] | – |
| MiniCheck-T5 | – | 56.6 | 0 | 0.69 | [ , ] | – |
| PremiseCheck with different verifiers | ||||||
| Cost / comment | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Paper length (tokens) | Holistic GPT-5.5 | Premise- Check | Cost (%) |
| 4.9k–8.1k | $0.0200 | $0.0107 | 53.3 |
| 8.1k–9.6k | $0.0211 | $0.0111 | 52.4 |
| 9.7k–24k | $0.0240 | $0.0116 | 48.5 |
| Factual label | Judgment label | |||
| System | AUROC | [95% CI] | AUROC | [95% CI] |
| Natural-science reviews (factual: 65 errors; judgment: 315 errors) | ||||
| Holistic GPT-5.5 | 67.8 | – | 57.8 | – |
| PremiseCheck | 67.5 | [ , ] | 53.5 | [ , ] |
| Machine learning reviews (factual: 46 of 216 comments; judgment: 16 of 296 comments) | ||||
| Holistic GPT-5.5 | 66.9 | – | 81.5 | – |
| Code | Failure | FA | Miss |
|---|---|---|---|
| Decompose | 40 | 19 | |
| D1 | Adds a claim the reviewer did not make | 21 | 0 |
| D2 | Refers to the wrong object | 12 | 0 |
| D3 | Hinges on a vague quantifier | 7 | 0 |
| D4 | Erroneous claim not extracted or weakened | 0 | 19 |
| Route | 10 | 6 | |
| [95% CI] | |||||
| System | AUROC | Cost (%) | Latency (s) | to reference | to batched holistic (none) |
| Per comment | |||||
| Holistic GPT-5.5 (medium, ref.) | 63.2 | 100.0 | 6.27 | – | [ , ] |
| PremiseCheck (none, ) | 65.7 | 24.7 | 2.80 | [ , ] | |
| Fusion: holistic + PremiseCheck (medium) | 64.9 | 151.2 | 6.27 | [ , ] | – |
| Fusion: holistic + PremiseCheck (low) | 65.5 | 134.3 | 6.27 | [ , ] | – |
Automated Fact-Checking
Automated fact-checking detects checkable claims, retrieves evidence, and assesses whether that evidence supports or refutes them.
See all 136 papers