arXiv:2608.06417cs.LGcs.CL2026-08

通过激活工程检测虚假信息,无需微调模型或外部知识。

Latent Fact-Checking: Detecting Misinformation through Activation Engineering

论文配图:Latent Fact-Checking: Detecting Misinformation through Activation Engineering
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 利用真假陈述的激活差异,提取语言模型中的虚假方向。
  • 小模型上性能超越零样本提示,大模型也表现稳定。
  • 适合追求高效、无外部依赖的虚假信息检测场景。

网络虚假信息泛滥推动了可扩展检测系统的需求。现有方法多依赖表面语言特征或外部知识检索,本文将真实性视为语言模型表示空间的几何属性。提出基于激活工程的虚假信息检测框架,通过对比成对真实与虚假陈述的激活,依据差异均值原则(CAA)在残差流中提取虚假方向。推理时,将未见声明的最后一个标记激活投影到该方向,并输入MLP进行分类。该方法无需微调主干模型、不依赖外部证据检索,仅需用于估计方向的对比对作为监督。在三个事实核查基准(AVeriTeC、LIAR、FACTors)上,对来自Gemma、Llama和Qwen系列共11个模型(270M至12B参数)进行了评估。虚假方向在不同模型规模和架构家族间均可复现,最后标记投影在LIAR和FACTors上达到或超过零样本/少样本提示基线,尤其在小模型上提升显著。在AVeriTeC上表现受限,归因于其基于证据的标注机制。结果表明,真实性是预训练语言模型隐空间中结构化且线性可分的概念,支持以可解释性驱动的虚假信息检测作为检索式流程的实用补充。代码已公开于https://github.com/Malta-Lab/LaFaCt。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

The proliferation of misinformation online has driven demand for scalable detection systems. While most existing approaches rely on surface-level linguistic features or external knowledge retrieval, we examine truthfulness as a geometric property of a language model's representation space. We introduce a misinformation detection framework grounded in activation engineering, which leverages the latent geometry of transformer models. Our approach elicits a misinformation direction in the residual stream by contrasting activations from paired truthful and false statements, following the difference-in-means principle of Contrastive Activation Addition (CAA). At inference time, the last-token activation of an unseen claim is projected onto this direction, and the projected representation is fed to an Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) for classification. The procedure requires no fine-tuning of the backbone model, no external evidence retrieval, and no task-specific supervision beyond the contrastive pairs used to estimate the direction. We evaluate the method across 11 models from the Gemma, Llama, and Qwen families, ranging from 270M to 12B parameters, on three fact-checking benchmarks: AVeriTeC, LIAR, and FACTors. The falsehood direction is recoverable across model scales and architectural families, and last-token projection matches or surpasses zero-shot and few-shot prompting baselines on LIAR and FACTors, with the largest gains observed for smaller models. Performance on AVeriTeC is more limited, which we attribute to its evidence-grounded labeling scheme. These findings provide evidence that truthfulness is a structured, linearly separable concept in the latent space of pretrained language models, and point toward interpretability-driven misinformation detection as a practical complement to retrieval-based pipelines. The code is available on https://github.com/Malta-Lab/LaFaCt.

虚假信息检测激活工程无监督可解释性

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