PROOF: Profiling Reliability of Object-Level Facts in Large Language Models

Abstract:Aggregate factuality scores hide where a language model succeeds, which relations it confuses, and whether an answer survives innocuous changes to the question or decoder. We introduce PROOF, a profile-oriented benchmark for factual coverage in instruction-tuned language models. PROOF converts a frozen Wikidata snapshot into 18,486 English multiple-choice questions grounded in 11,779 semantic facts, 101 classes, 392 properties, and 14 domains. Each question has an explicit "I don't know" option, a "No correct option" control, and nine controlled formulations; 1,849 questions are no-correct-option traps. We evaluate 18 open-weight model deployments on 166,374 prompts each and separately perturb decoding on a fixed 10% subset. Base factual accuracy ranges from 6.58% to 57.59% (chance: 8.64%), yet every model has a 19.3-36.4 percentage-point spread across domains. Paired facts reveal direction-dependent retrieval, usually favoring subject-to-object queries, with the pattern reversing for one model. We find no consistent temporal penalty after exact-stratum adjustment. Neutral wording changes accuracy by as much as 26.5 percentage points, while adversarial formulations break up to 79.4% of answers that were initially correct. Direct switching to an injected false label varies from 0.04% to 27.5%, showing that accuracy loss and hint following are distinct. Selected-token confidence often indicates severe overconfidence, and decoder perturbations move accuracy by up to 15.7 percentage points and domain profiles by 16.8 points. PROOF therefore measures factual coverage as a structured, intervention-aware profile rather than a single claim about what a model "believes."

Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2609.29504 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2609.29504v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.29504 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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