How does Misinformation Affect Large Language Model Behaviors and Preferences?

Miao Peng, Nuo Chen, Jianheng Tang, Jia Li


Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in knowledge-intensive tasks, while they remain vulnerable when encountering misinformation. Existing studies have explored the role of LLMs in combating misinformation, but there is still a lack of fine-grained analysis on the specific aspects and extent to which LLMs are influenced by misinformation. To bridge this gap, we present MisBench, the current largest and most comprehensive benchmark for evaluating LLMs’ behavior and knowledge preference toward misinformation. MisBench consists of 10,346,712 pieces of misinformation, which uniquely considers both knowledge-based conflicts and stylistic variations in misinformation. Empirical results reveal that while LLMs demonstrate comparable abilities in discerning misinformation, they still remain susceptible to knowledge conflicts and stylistic variations. Based on these findings, we further propose a novel approach called Reconstruct to Discriminate (RtD) to strengthen LLMs’ ability to detect misinformation. Our study provides valuable insights into LLMs’ interactions with misinformation, and we believe MisBench can serve as an effective benchmark for evaluating LLM-based detectors and enhancing their reliability in real-world applications. Codes and data are available at: https://github.com/GKNL/MisBench.
Anthology ID:
2025.acl-long.674
Volume:
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
13711–13748
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.674/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Miao Peng, Nuo Chen, Jianheng Tang, and Jia Li. 2025. How does Misinformation Affect Large Language Model Behaviors and Preferences?. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 13711–13748, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
How does Misinformation Affect Large Language Model Behaviors and Preferences? (Peng et al., ACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.674.pdf