GQC: LLM-Based Grouped QA Consolidation for Open-Domain Fact Verification at AVeriTeC

AbstractStructured fact verification benchmarks like AVeriTeC decompose claims into QA pairs to support fine-grained reasoning. However, current systems generate QA pairs independently for each evidence sentence, leading to redundancy, drift, and noise. We introduce a modular LLM-based QA consolidation module that jointly filters, clusters, and rewrites QA pairs at the claim level. Experiments show that this method improves evidence quality and veracity prediction accuracy. Our analysis also highlights the impact of model scale and alignment on downstream performance.