REVIEW 2 major objections 3 minor 36 references
UAQFact: Evaluating Factual Knowledge Utilization of LLMs on Unanswerable Questions
T0 review · 2 major / 3 minor · reviewed 2026-08-07 · deepseek-v4-flash
Pith's one-line read This paper introduces UAQFact, a bilingual benchmark of 6,985 unanswerable questions and 6,985 answerable ones built from factual triples, and uses it to show that LLMs often know the relevant facts yet still answer instead of refusing.
desk verdict A solid bilingual UAQ benchmark grounded in Wikidata, but Task 3's CoT clues embed the label rule, so the external-knowledge-utilization claim needs a control or a disclaimer. read the letter →
The pith
A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.
The reading
What carries the argument
The load-bearing object is UAQFact, a template-generated bilingual dataset in which every UAQ is built from a contradiction among real factual triples, via three question types: set intersection, time constraint, and false-dilemma choice. On top of it, two new evaluation tasks and the knowledge-aware refusal rate (KRR) metric carry the argument: Task 2 converts each UAQ into multiple-choice factual probes and scores refusal only on cases where the model passes the knowledge test, while Task 3 embeds the same facts in a chain-of-thought clue and measures how much the refusal gap improves. KRR is what lets the paper compare models with different knowledge stores on a single utilization axis.
What would settle it
Run Task 3 with the same factual answers but without the explicit refusal rule, stating the sub-answers but omitting the instruction that an empty intersection means no answer; if the refusal gap drops sharply, the Task 3 gains are largely instruction-following, not knowledge use.
Extended reading notes
Core claim
The central claim is that UAQFact measures whether LLMs can use factual knowledge—stored internally or supplied externally—when facing unanswerable questions, and that the measurements reveal a systematic gap between knowledge and refusal. The dataset is generated from real factual triples so that each UAQ has an empty answer set by construction: an intersection with no common element, a time window no fact falls in, or a dilemma whose listed candidates are all wrong. Task 2 finds that LLMs carry the relevant facts, with knowledge pass rates of 68–83%, but their knowledge-aware refusal rate remains low, meaning they refuse only 54–69% of UAQs that they demonstrably have knowledge about. Task 3 provides the same facts inside a step-by-step clue; this improves refusal discrimination but does not close the gap, and the paper reports the best English refusal-gap score at roughly 75%. The paper attributes this residual gap to limits in knowledge utilization rather than knowledge storage.
Load-bearing premise
The load-bearing premise is that Task 3 tests external knowledge use; the paper does not control for the fact that its reasoning clue embeds the exact decision rule that makes the question unanswerable, so the measured gains may reflect instruction-following rather than knowledge utilization.
Editorial extensions
If this is right
- Since knowledge pass rates are high while knowledge-aware refusal rates are low, improving refusal behavior should target knowledge utilization, not knowledge storage.
- Supplying external factual knowledge as a step-by-step clue raises refusal discrimination for every tested model, so knowledge access is a useful lever even when models already hold the facts.
- The gap does not close with perfect facts: the best English refusal-gap score is about 75%, so LLMs still answer a meaningful fraction of unanswerable questions despite having the needed information.
- Larger models show better refusal discrimination in the scaling experiments, but their refusal rates on UAQ and ABQ fluctuate independently, indicating that scale alone does not calibrate refusal behavior.
- The knowledge-aware refusal rate allows comparisons across models with different internal knowledge levels, making it a usable metric for future UAQ evaluations.
Reading between the lines
- Editorial inference: because the Task 3 clue states the refusal rule outright, the reported external-knowledge gains likely overstate knowledge use; a controlled variant that hides the rule would disentangle the two.
- Editorial inference: if the utilization gap is real, fine-tuning on tasks that reward refusing when two fact sets have empty intersection should improve KRR without adding new facts; this is directly testable.
- Editorial inference: the KRR formula couples refusal discrimination with knowledge pass rate, so a low KRR can also come from over-refusing answerable questions; future work could decompose KRR into knowledge-conditional false-refusal and false-answer components.
- Editorial inference: extending the same knowledge-graph contradiction construction to longer multi-hop chains of facts would show whether the utilization gap grows with reasoning depth, not just factual overlap.
Editorial analysis
A structured set of objections, weighed in public.
Referee Report
Summary. The paper introduces UAQFact, a bilingual (English/Chinese) dataset of 6,985 unanswerable questions (UAQ) and an equal number of answerable questions (ABQ), generated from Wikidata triples and accompanied by auxiliary factual knowledge and reasoning clues. The authors propose three evaluation tasks: (1) basic UAQ/ABQ discrimination, (2) assessing utilization of internal knowledge via multiple-choice probes and a new composite metric (knowledge-aware refusal rate, KRR), and (3) assessing utilization of external knowledge via chain-of-thought clues. Experiments across open-source and black-box LLMs show that models pass knowledge probes at high rates (KPR 68-83%) but achieve lower knowledge-aware refusal rates, and that providing external clues improves refusal discrimination but does not fully close the gap.
Significance. If its evaluation methodology is sound, UAQFact is a potentially valuable resource: it is large, bilingual, and built from a knowledge graph with transparent and manually inspected construction (99.2% quality on a 900-item check), and it makes a concrete step toward measuring whether LLMs can apply factual knowledge to recognize unanswerability. The paper also ships the dataset and code, which supports reproducibility. However, the two new tasks that carry the central knowledge-utilization claim currently have important methodological confounds, so the significance of the empirical findings depends on whether those confounds can be addressed.
major comments (2)
- [§4.4, Table 17, Table 13] Task 3's CoT clue does more than supply external facts: it embeds the exact decision rule that determines the UAQ label (e.g., 'If there is no intersection of the answers to the sub-questions, then there is no answer to the question') along with the answer sets themselves. An LLM can therefore output the correct refusal by applying a direct procedural instruction, without exercising the kind of knowledge-based judgment the task claims to measure. The preliminary comparison in Table 13 is revealing: EKnow (Triple) provides the factual sets without the rule, and for Llama3 the R∆ is 49.06, whereas EKnow (CoT) with the rule reaches 74.54; the paper chooses CoT because it yields higher R∆, thereby amplifying the confound. To support the claim that external factual knowledge utilization is being measured, the authors should include a control that provides the answer sets without the decision sentence, or a rule that does not directly entail the UAQ label, and show that the R∆ gain persists beyond instruction-following.
- [§4.1, Eq. (1)] The definition of the knowledge-aware refusal rate is not mathematically well-formed as typeset: 'KRR = (1 + e^{−R∆·KPR−1})^{-1}' is ambiguous, and under the most natural readings (e.g., a sigmoid of R∆·KPR) the reported values are inconsistent. For instance, Llama3 in English has R∆ = 20.89 and KPR = 73.11, so R∆·KPR is about 1527; a sigmoid of that argument would saturate at 1, not 57.10. Because KRR is the core metric behind the Task 2 conclusion that knowledge utilization lags knowledge storage, the authors must provide a clear, correct formula and verify that the reported numbers follow from it.
minor comments (3)
- [Table 17 (Time example)] The English Time reasoning clue mixes entities: the main question is about Erfurt's twinned city, but the auxiliary question asks 'When did Estadio GEBA start participating in association football the first time?', which is unrelated and appears to be a template-filling artifact. This should be corrected, and the clue-generation pipeline should be checked for similar mismatches.
- [§3.1 and Appendix D] The manual inspection reports that 7 out of 900 sampled questions (0.8%) are mislabeled due to Wikidata knowledge errors, but the paper does not state whether these questions were removed or corrected in the released dataset. If they remain, the benchmark contains known label noise; the authors should clarify and ideally filter or repair these instances.
- [§4.4 and Table 13] The preliminary EKnow (Triple) results show a large improvement in ABQ accuracy (e.g., Qwen2.5 from 47.73 to 95.00), yet the paper only reports R∆ and does not discuss this accuracy trade-off. A fuller presentation of the triple condition would help readers assess the relative roles of factual content and rule-based scaffolding.
Circularity Check
No significant circularity overall; Task 3's reasoning clue embeds the UAQ decision rule and answer sets, so its R∆ gains partly measure instruction following rather than knowledge utilization.
-
self definitional
[Section 3.2 Task 3; Table 17 (Inter clue); Section 4.4 and Table 12]
"Combine the answers to q1 and q2 to make a judgment. If there is an intersection of the answers to the sub-questions, then the answer to the question is this intersection. If there is no intersection of the answers to the sub-questions, then there is no answer to the question. In summary, my answer is:"
The Task 3 reasoning clue is constructed from the same Wikidata factual triples that define the UAQ/ABQ label, and it explicitly states the rule that generates the label: UAQ is precisely the case where the two sub-answer sets have no intersection. The prompt (Table 6) already instructs models to return ##None## when there is no suitable answer, so the final sentence of the clue restates the ground-truth label. A model can therefore output the correct refusal by following the decision rule without performing knowledge-based comparison or retrieval.
full rationale
UAQFact's labels and factual triples are obtained from external Wikidata SPARQL queries, so the dataset construction is not circular and is grounded outside the paper's own fitted values. Task 1 is a direct refusal-rate benchmark using human-validated lexical matching, and this part of the evaluation is independent of the paper's claims. Task 2's KPR is a standard multiple-choice knowledge probe, and KRR is a fixed monotone transform of Task 1's R∆ and KPR; it involves no fitted parameters, although it is a heuristic combination rather than a direct measure of utilization. The only load-bearing concern is Task 3, where the reasoning clue states the exact UAQ labeling rule and supplies the answer sets that determine the intersection, making the correct response directly readable from the clue. The paper also reports in Appendix F that CoT-form knowledge was preferred over triple-form knowledge partly because CoT gives higher R∆, which further indicates that the selected condition embeds the decision rule. This is a genuine but partial confound: it weakens the claim that Task 3 measures external knowledge utilization, yet it does not make the empirical outcomes tautological, since models still fail to follow the clue in many cases. There is no load-bearing self-citation chain and no fitted input renamed as a prediction. Overall, the paper is self-contained against external knowledge-graph ground truth, and the circularity score is low.
Assumptions & free parameters
assumptions (4)
- domain assumption Unanswerability is defined by the absence of a query result in Wikidata, not by real-world verification.
- domain assumption A chain-of-thought clue that supplies sub-question answers and the 'if no intersection, no answer' rule is a valid measure of external factual knowledge utilization.
- domain assumption Lexical matching of refusal keywords identifies refusals with human-level accuracy.
- domain assumption GPT-3.5-generated templates, after manual inspection, are fluent and semantically aligned with their Wikidata properties.
Cite this review
Pith. "Pith review of UAQFact: Evaluating Factual Knowledge Utilization of LLMs on Unanswerable Questions." pith.science (2026). https://pith.science/paper/BWN5XYRI
@misc{pith2026250523461,
author = {Pith},
title = {Pith review of: UAQFact: Evaluating Factual Knowledge Utilization of LLMs on Unanswerable Questions},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://pith.science/paper/BWN5XYRI}},
note = {Machine review of arXiv:2505.23461}
}
read the original abstract
Handling unanswerable questions (UAQ) is crucial for LLMs, as it helps prevent misleading responses in complex situations. While previous studies have built several datasets to assess LLMs' performance on UAQ, these datasets lack factual knowledge support, which limits the evaluation of LLMs' ability to utilize their factual knowledge when handling UAQ. To address the limitation, we introduce a new unanswerable question dataset UAQFact, a bilingual dataset with auxiliary factual knowledge created from a Knowledge Graph. Based on UAQFact, we further define two new tasks to measure LLMs' ability to utilize internal and external factual knowledge, respectively. Our experimental results across multiple LLM series show that UAQFact presents significant challenges, as LLMs do not consistently perform well even when they have factual knowledge stored. Additionally, we find that incorporating external knowledge may enhance performance, but LLMs still cannot make full use of the knowledge which may result in incorrect responses.
Figures
Reference graph
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Reviewed August 7, 2026 · model on record in the stance chip above.
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