LLM-based fact-checking verifies complex claims through decomposition, retrieval, and reasoning aggregation. Existing methods expand verification inputs to cover more factual conditions, but added fragments can be redundant or misleading, compete with decisive evidence, and bias predictions toward surface relevance. Debiasing methods mitigate this bias by estimating shortcut effects from claim-side cues or biased signals in constructed inputs. However, because they calibrate verifier predictions after input construction, they are not designed to repair missing or noisy verification states. Thus, complex fact-checking should balance factual coverage and noise control during verification-state construction. We propose ERGA, an Explorer–Refiner Game with Backdoor-Adjusted Verdict Aggregation. ERGA formulates verification as editable state construction, initializing the state from decomposed verification units, retrieved evidence, and local analyses. It then runs an adversarial Explorer–Refiner game over this state: the Explorer strengthens under-covered factual signals, while the Refiner merges redundancy and separates weak or misleading fragments. Through this game interaction, ERGA obtains a refined state with a better coverage–noise balance and a removed fragment record. For verdict aggregation, ERGA uses the removed-fragment record to condition verifier predictions and aggregates them in a backdoor-adjusted form to reduce residual shortcut effects. Experiments on HoVer and FEVEROUS-S show that ERGA outperforms strong baselines.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) streamlines long-document understanding by leveraging retrieval mechanisms to restrict input images to a highly curated subset. However, existing multimodal RAG pipelines primarily face two critical challenges: first, standard semantic similarity retrievers frequently fetch topically overlapping yet answer-void distractor pages that mislead downstream generation; second, rigid single-pass pipelines heavily depend on initial retrieval success, where any omission of core evidence inevitably causes cascading errors. To address these challenges, we introduce **HiEvi-RAG**, a hierarchical, evidence-driven multimodal RAG framework for closed-domain document understanding. HiEvi-RAG systematically factorizes complex queries into a cooperative four-stage pipeline: (1) hierarchical question decomposition to break multi-hop root queries into atomic child questions; (2) coarse visual page retrieval leveraging a multimodal retriever to fetch candidate pages based on semantic similarity; (3) fine-grained page verification via EviAgent, a specialized multi-page verifier trained with GRPO to execute cross-page reasoning over multi-image blocks; and (4) memory-guided iterative generation that leverages accumulated sub-question context to execute multi-round, dynamic reasoning over the prioritized sequence. Extensive evaluations across four benchmarks demonstrate the robust efficacy and synergy of our framework, which significantly outperforms existing open-source baselines and exceeds the previous state-of-the-art by an average of 8.05% in accuracy.

Large language model agents in social deduction games must reason and speak under hidden roles, shifting public beliefs, and social pressure. Existing methods mainly target final win rate through strategic prompting, belief modeling, or reinforcement learning, but they leave the utterance-level trade-off between belief correction and social risk largely implicit. In false-consensus intervention, useful private information can move the group toward the truth, while poorly timed or overly direct speech can trigger suspicion or rejection. We propose PACR-Pro, a risk-aware rhetorical decision framework for false-consensus intervention. PACR-Pro maps each speaking step to consensus-conflict encoding, structured candidate-action generation, Pareto-based selection, and risk-adaptive utterance realization. A dual-branch Epistemic-Social Critic scores candidate actions, and a state-conditioned 𝜆 policy adjusts the trade-off between epistemic value and social safety. We train these decision modules offline from historical games and evaluate PACR-Pro on One Night Ultimate Werewolf (ONUW) as the test platform. Experiments on standard ONUW games and the Wolf-Pack Induction Benchmark show that PACR-Pro achieves the best mixed-agent win rate, the highest attack win rate, the lowest attack vote rate, and the smallest attack-control win-rate gap among all baselines.