TrendFact: A Benchmark Towards Hotspot Perception in Automatic Fact-Checking

With the surge of online misinformation, Large Language Models (LLMs) and Reasoning Large Language Models (RLMs) serving as Automatic Fact-Checking (AFC) systems have emerged as a prominent paradigm for reliable, explainable verification. However, our empirical study reveals that this paradigm faces a critical risk asymmetry challenge when deployed in the real world under resource-constrained environments. While Hotspot Perception Ability (HPA), the capacity to dynamically allocate reasoning resources based on social impact, is essential to mitigate this risk, existing benchmarks lack the social metadata and evaluation framework to meet this urgent evaluation needs, thereby hindering the advancement of these AFC systems. To bridge this gap, we introduce TrendFact, the first benchmark capable of evaluating HPA and three fact-checking tasks. It consists of 7,643 curated samples sourced from trending platforms and professional datasets, with an evidence library containing 366,634 entries. To enable HPA assessment, we propose two novel metrics: the Explanation Consistency Score (ECS) to evaluate the reliability of verification reasoning, and the Hotspot Claim Perception Index (HCPI) to quantify the overall HPA of AFC systems. Extensive experiments demonstrate that existing AFC systems exhibit limited performance on TrendFact. Furthermore, our proposed FactISR framework effectively enhances HPA and computational efficiency for RLMs-served AFC systems. * Equal contribution † Corresponding Author Evidence: The Forbidden City served as the imperial palace for 24 emperors during the Ming and Qing dynasties. Construction of the Forbidden City began in 1406, during the fourth year of Emperor Yongle's reign in the Ming Dynasty, and was completed in 1420, the 18th year of his reign. Situated at the heart of Beijing's central axis, the Forbidden City covers a land area of 720,000 square meters and has a built-up area of approximately 150,000 square meters...... Label: REFUTE Explanation: Evidence indicates that the construction of the Forbidden City began in the fourth year of Emperor Yongle's reign during the Ming Dynasty ( 1406 ) and was completed in the 18th year of his reign (1420). As of 2020, the Forbidden City has been built for 600 years. Therefore, this claim is incorrect.