Diagnosing LLM Arbitration Behavior over Pre-evidence Epistemic States in RAG-based Fact-Checking

ArXi:2606.01120v1 Announce Type: new In RAG-based fact-checking, LLMs are increasingly used as verifiers to check given claims against retrieved evidence. Their parametric knowledge can induce pre-evidence tendencies that may conflict with the retrieved context, yet existing evaluation frameworks do not characterize such prior-context discrepancy or measure how verifiers arbitrate between parametric and contextual signals. We