SAGE-QA: Semantic-Aware, Grounded Evaluation for Closed-Context Question Answering on SQuAD 2.0

arXiv:2611.16300v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Closed-context question answering (QA) requires a system to generate an answer strictly supported by a supplied passage, or to abstain when the passage lacks adequate evidence. SQuAD 2.0 is a widely used benchmark for this setting, scored by Exact Match (EM) i.e., character-level agreement with human reference spans after lexical normalization. For generative large language models (LLMs), however, an EM failure may reflect a valid paraphrase or an alternative passage-supported answer rather than a hallucination. The best prior leaderboard EM is approximately 91%, but evaluating generative models requires separating lexical divergence from factual error. We introduce SAGE-QA (Semantic-Aware, Grounded Evaluation for Question Answering), a multi-tiered framework combining reference-based Semantic Equivalence Scoring (SES) and passage-based Re-Validation Scoring (RVS). On a fixed set of 10,000 SQuAD 2.0 validation examples, we compute EM and decision-matrix F1 from TP, TN, FP, and FN counts for zero-shot closed-weight frontier models and for open-weight models, untuned and fine-tuned. Zero-shot, Claude Opus 4.6 and Gemini 3.1 Pro reach 85.21 and 86.66 EM, outperforming untuned Llama 3 8B (56.88), gpt-oss-20b (66.28), and Llama 3.3 70B (71.39). Parameter-efficient fine-tuning adds 21.19 to 34.06 EM points, raising these models to 90.94, 87.47, and 94.24 EM, respectively. Auditing the frontier models with SAGE-QA and an external LLM judge yields dataset-wide SES scores of 92.81 for Claude Opus 4.6 and 91.67 for Gemini 3.1 Pro, and hybrid RVS scores, which combine benchmark credit with passage-based judge assessments, of 97.96 and 98.02. Fine-tuned open-weight models perform best, with fine-tuned Llama 3.3 70B surpassing the previous best known EM.