NLPCC 2026 Task 10: Citation-Level Faithfulness Verification with DeBERTa Ensembles and Class-Wise Calibration

Abstract

This paper presents our system for Track 2 of the NLPCC 2026 Shared Task 10 on citation-level faithfulness in AI-assisted scientific reporting. Given an atomic scientific claim and the structured full text of its cited paper, the task requires both a four-way relation label and up to three evidence paragraph identifiers. The label head ensembles a paragraph-aware cross-encoder with a document-level DeBERTa-large classifier, followed by class-wise decision calibration. Probability-level fusion is motivated by an out-of-fold tendency to over-predict Topical Match. The evidence head combines paragraph scores from top-20 and top-30 joint models with BM25 scores. The system runs fully offline without external retrieval or LLM prompting. On the final leaderboard, our system achieved 82.9898 overall (89.5491 Macro-F1 and 76.4305 Joint@3), ranking second in Track 2. Ablations and error analysis show that model complementarity and calibration drive the label gains. Gold-evidence inference changes label Macro-F1 negligibly, whereas evidence ranking remains important for Joint@3.