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.
arXiv:2609.01432v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scientific citations carry rhetorical intent. Scholars may cite prior work positively (supporting), negatively (contrasting), or neutrally (mentionin...
Large language models are increasingly deployed in citation-augmented settings, yet the effect of citation presence on model behavior independent of factual content remains poorly understood. We introduce AuthorityBench, a 220,564-prompt multi-domain benchmark that isolates how citation-based authority signals influence epistemic behavior in LLMs.
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.
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.
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."
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.
The study examines whether large language models (LLMs) used as conversational search engines for academic literature prioritize papers based on authority signals—such as author prestige, venue, and citations—rather than content. By keeping titles and abstracts constant and manipulating authority metadata across three counterfactual conditions (original, flipped, boosted), the researchers tested eight LLMs in a single-turn, top‑1 recommendation scenario. Results reveal a substantial, directional authority bias that varies across models and is only partially mitigated by prompt-level debiasing, while also highlighting a significant say‑do gap where debiasing instructions suppress authority mentions more quickly than authority-driven flips, leading to underestimation of behavioral bias.
arXiv:2608. 19230v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As language models move from drafting prose to running literature-search agents with tool calls, fabricated references are becoming easier to catch and constrain.
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:2603. 26791v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Assessing a cited paper's impact is typically done by analyzing its citation context in isolation within the citing paper.
The paper introduces AttriBench, a benchmark dataset that balances author fame and demographics to study quote attribution in large language models (LLMs). Using AttriBench, the authors evaluate 11 popular LLMs and find that accurate attribution remains difficult, with significant disparities across race, gender, and intersectional groups. They also identify a new failure mode—suppression—where models omit attribution entirely, which is unevenly distributed across demographics and not reflected by standard accuracy metrics.