The paper evaluates how modern large language models use internal web search to answer factual questions. Using 783 static queries and 288 dynamic queries, the authors find that enabling retrieval improves accuracy on static questions but hurts confidence calibration. On dynamic queries, models often retrieve but still achieve less than 70% accuracy, mainly due to poor query formulation and source selection, indicating that internal web search works better as a quick verification tool than a full information‑retrieval system.
By Sahil Kale
arXiv:2506.17585v4 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Large language models can answer questions correctly and still hallucinate their citations. Most citation systems address this by retrieving docume...
By Yukun Huang, Sanxing Chen, Jian Pei, Manzil Zaheer, Bhuwan Dhingra
The paper introduces "stale‑document poisoning," a temporal alignment failure where outdated retrieval evidence causes retrieval‑augmented generation models to produce incorrect answers even when the model could answer correctly without retrieval. A benchmark of 317 verified knowledge reversals across medicine, law, software, and platform policy shows that outdated evidence flips 30–37% of Llama and Qwen answers, rising to 66–75% when models are explicitly instructed to trust the document. The study demonstrates that providing explicit validity information and a recency‑aware re‑ranker can substantially reduce poisoning, highlighting the need for models to assess whether retrieved evidence remains applicable.
By Md Shamim Ahmed, Lukas Galke Poech, Richard R\"{o}ttger
arXiv:2606. 28358v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) aims to enhance the trustworthiness of Large Language Models (LLMs) by grounding their outputs in external documents, often using inline citations for verifiability.
By Ian van Dort (University of Amsterdam), Maria Heuss (University of Amsterdam)
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...
By Shuyao Xiao, Shengling Wang, Xuan Chen, Ke Chao, Ming Cui, Feifei Qian, Chaoyang Mei, Fanlin Meng, Lulu Wang, Ziming Yu, Junxi Yin
arXiv:2606. 05241v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Public benchmarks enable fair and reproducible evaluation of LLM reasoning, but they become fragile for deep research agents that actively search the web during inference.
By Yongjie Wang, Xinyue Zhang, Kunhong Yao, Zhiwei Zeng, Kaisong Song, Jun Lin, Zhiqi Shen
arXiv:2608.22118v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: LLM responses are based on the internet (via training or RAG), and AI is now used to generate a significant amount of content online (Paredes et al., 2...
By Gregory Druck, Ethan Smith
LLM agents increasingly answer questions over dynamic raw-document collections, where files may change before preprocessing, and relevant evidence (spans, sections, pages, or tables) is query-dependent. Existing retrieval-augmented approaches pre-materialize evidence via fixed chunking, embeddings, or persistent indexes: effective for lookup, yet costly, stale-prone, and committed to a granularity before the query is known.
arXiv:2608. 16185v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM agents increasingly answer questions over dynamic raw-document collections, where files may change before preprocessing, and relevant evidence (spans, sections, pages, or tables) is query-dependent.
By Xingjun Wang, Gongsheng Li, Qi Fan, Yunlin Mao, Luyan Su, Yingda Chen
The paper introduces RAG‑Stress, a diagnostic protocol that tests how retrieval‑augmented generation models handle misleading evidence. By fixing the question and reference answer, editing a single assertion to support an incorrect answer, and varying source‑priority policies and evidence positions, the study measures misleading rate (MR) and clean accuracy across fifteen systems on multiple QA datasets. Results show that prioritizing documents increases MR by 10.9–13.5 percentage points, with the highest MR when the misleading span appears at the end of the evidence.
By Shunyuan Zhou, Hao Chen, Tianyu Wang, Goose Lin, Zaiyuan Wang, Haiying Zhao
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.
By Boqin Yuan, Ziqi Wang
The paper investigates why large language models (LLMs) miss evidence in multi‑hop retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG). It introduces ExecutionRAG, a training‑free register that tracks open sub‑questions and their supporting evidence, allowing the authors to distinguish between true retrieval failures and search drift. Using this method on 1,000 MuSiQue questions, the study shows a significant reduction in missed evidence but also reveals that other error types, such as premature resolutions and abstentions, increase, shifting the bottleneck from search guidance to evidence verification.
By Jiaqi Wei, Wenxuan Huang, Chengdong Xu, Xiang Zhang, Wanli Ouyang