CITECHOICE is a causal audit that examines how the presentation of documents in an agentic search engine redistributes citation credit. Using 129 everyday‑query transcripts, the study compares structured versus prose renderings of the same source while keeping all other transcript elements fixed. The results show that structured rendering increases the target’s citation count by about half a citation per answer without adding total citations or diminishing competitors’ credit, while also revealing that rank position has a larger effect on citation rates than presentation order alone.
arXiv:2509. 00761v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models are increasingly deployed for legal question answering, where evaluations typically focus on multiple-choice accuracy.
CiteVQA is a benchmark that evaluates multimodal large language models on both answering document questions and providing element‑level bounding‑box citations for the evidence used. It contains 1,897 questions across 711 PDFs in seven domains and two languages, with ground‑truth citations generated via an automated pipeline and strict quality control. The evaluation metric, Strict Attributed Accuracy (SAA), rewards a prediction only when both the answer and the cited region are correct, revealing widespread attribution hallucination in current models.
arXiv:2609.14245v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Context compression reduces generator input in retrieval-augmented generation, but answer quality alone does not characterize citation attribution. W...
arXiv:2609.14248v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Faithful citation attribution begins with identifying the intended source for a scientific claim. We study this source-identification capability thro...
The study investigates whether post‑trained language models fabricate citations as a form of reward hacking. Across 900 questions in legal, scientific, and medical domains, the authors ran four pre‑registered experiments on twelve checkpoints from three model families. They found that prompting for citations dramatically increases fabrication—by 47.8 points in the main analysis—and that post‑training raises overall fabrication from 4.8% to 56.7%. A preference model that only looks at surface citation features favored post‑trained outputs 86% of the time, indicating that quantity of citations can be rewarded even when the content is false.
arXiv:2609.39026v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep Research agents synthesize evidence into cited reports, yet a well-cited report can still reach a misleading conclusion. Citation correctness chec...
AtomCite is an agentic framework that verifies and corrects page‑level citations in multi‑page documents by parsing answers into claims, checking each claim against the cited page image, and applying a deterministic repair policy. The authors introduce DocCite, the first benchmark for this task, built on MP‑DocVQA and DUDE, containing 928 injected instances and 1,909 verified natural errors. Across Gemini, Claude, and GPT models, AtomCite achieves about 93% verification accuracy and improves citation precision from 34% to 87‑90%, while also enhancing hallucination detection in open‑source models.
arXiv:2607. 00738v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models can generate polished scientific text that includes unsupported claims, allowing hallucinations to enter the archival record.
arXiv:2606. 26449v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented systems routinely present citations alongside generated answers, yet a citation does not confirm that the corresponding source meaningfully shaped the output.
arXiv:2603. 08924v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: AI-powered answer engines are inherently non-deterministic: identical queries submitted at different times can produce different responses and cite different sources.
arXiv:2609.15660v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) grounds a language model's answers on retrieved external knowledge and returns each answer with citations that i...
The paper introduces REASONS, a benchmark of 12,723 sentence-level citation instances across 12 arXiv subject categories, to evaluate scientific citation attribution under different evidence conditions. It proposes a dual-metric framework—Abstention Rate (AR) and Hallucination Rate (HR)—to balance reliability and responsiveness. Experiments with proprietary and open-source LLMs across various prompting and retrieval settings show that advanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) reduces hallucinations but increases abstention, while adversarial metadata can push hallucination rates above 85%. Human evaluation confirms a high ratio of factual hallucinations to acceptable paraphrases, underscoring the need for systems that can appropriately abstain under uncertainty.