arXiv Computation and Language

CiteVQA: Benchmarking Evidence Attribution for Trustworthy Document Intelligence

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 AI
Sep 10

AtomCite: Verification and Correction of Supplied Page-Level Citations in Multi-Page Documents

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.

By Chen Qian, Yimeng Wang, Yu Chen, Lingfei Wu, Andreas Stathopoulos
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 18

Are Finer Citations Always Better? Rethinking Granularity for Attributed Generation

The paper investigates how the granularity of citations—sentence, paragraph, or document level—affects the performance of large language models in attributed generation tasks. Across models ranging from 8B to 120B parameters, enforcing fine‑grained, sentence‑level citations consistently reduces performance, with median losses of 40% and up to 338% on specific tasks, while overall answer correctness remains largely unchanged. The study finds that attribution quality peaks at intermediate, paragraph‑level granularity, suggesting that overly fine citations break semantic dependencies and overly coarse ones add noise, and that the optimal granularity depends on model scale and the amount of evidence required. whyItMatters":"The findings reveal that the conventional preference for fine‑grained citations can actually harm model performance, indicating that attribution standards should be tailored to the model’s semantic scope rather than fixed by convention."

By Hexuan Wang, Jingyu Zhang, Benjamin Van Durme, Daniel Khashabi
arXiv AI
Sep 7

Attributable by Construction: Claim-Anchored Provenance for Multi-Document Summarization

The paper introduces CAMS, a Claim‑Anchored Multi‑Document Summarization framework that decomposes source documents into atomic claims, resolves provenance deterministically from verbatim quotes to token spans, clusters equivalent claims across documents, and rewrites summaries so each sentence ends with claim identifiers linking back to source spans. CAMS separates provenance (an invariant for each emitted sentence) from faithfulness (an objective encouraged by selection, rewriting, and verification). Evaluations on MultiNews, DiverseSumm, and zero‑shot WCEP show that CAMS matches strong baselines in summary quality while improving faithfulness and citation precision, raising attribution accuracy from 38% to 64% and reducing human verification time per claim by 3.4×.

By Shuo Guan
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Attribution in Scientific Literature: New Benchmark and Methods

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.

By Deepa Tilwani, Yash Saxena, Seyedali Mohammadi, Ankur Padia, Edward Raff, Amit Sheth, Srinivasan Parthasarathy, Manas Gaur
arXiv AI
Jul 24

Evaluating and Guarding Citation Faithfulness in Agentic Scientific Synthesis

arXiv:2607. 20527v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic LLM systems such as OpenScholar and PaperQA2 read the scientific literature and return cited answers, and both they and their benchmarks already check whether those citations hold, with a fixed attribution model or human graders.

By Taewan Goo, Junsik Kim, Kyulhee Han, GwonYul Jo, Jong-Soo Kim, Tae-Hyung Kim
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Abstention vs. Hallucination: Benchmarking LLM Source Attribution for Scientific Citations

The paper introduces REASONS, a benchmark comprising 12,723 sentence-level citation instances across 12 arXiv subject categories, to evaluate scientific citation attribution by large language models. It proposes a dual-metric framework—Abstention Rate (AR) and Hallucination Rate (HR)—to assess the trade-off between reliability and responsiveness. Experiments on proprietary and open-source LLMs under various prompting and retrieval settings show that advanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) reduces hallucinations but may increase abstention, while retrieval-augmented variants often maintain near-zero abstention. Human evaluation reveals a high ratio of factual hallucinations to acceptable paraphrases, underscoring the need for systems that can appropriately abstain under uncertainty.

By Deepa Tilwani, Yash Saxena, Seyedali Mohammadi, Ankur Padia, Edward Raff, Amit Sheth, Srinivasan Parthasarathy, Manas Gaur