arXiv AI

CiteGuard-RAG: A Validation-Centered AI System for Evidence-Grounded Question Answering

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

Assessing the Downstream Utility of Evidence-Aware Retrieval in RAG

The paper investigates whether incorporating an evidence-support signal into retrieval evaluation for retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG) improves downstream decision‑making. Across multiple benchmarks and a TREC RAG 2025 setting, the evidence signal alters retriever rankings but its benefits vary: it does not consistently enhance retriever training, its usefulness for system selection depends on generator instructions, and it does not reliably predict answer quality on unseen topics. Human filtering of evidence‑rich passages preserves useful content, yet evaluators disagree on whether this improves final answers, indicating that evidence‑aware evaluation alone does not guarantee better downstream outcomes.

By Utshab Kumar Ghosh, Debayan Mukhopadhyay, Shubham Chatterjee
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

UIC-AIHealth4All at ArchEHR-QA 2026: Answer-First Evidence Grounding for Clinical Question Answering

The UIC-AIHealth4All system was presented for the ArchEHR-QA 2026 shared task on grounded question answering from electronic health records. It participated in evidence identification, answer generation, and answer‑evidence alignment, using an answer‑first pipeline that generates candidate answers with cited note sentences before classifying the full evidence set. The system ranked third in evidence identification, ninth in answer generation, and fifth in answer‑evidence alignment, and a linguistic analysis showed its outputs were harder to read than clinician‑authored references, highlighting the need for readability optimization in clinical NLP.

By Mohammad Arvan, Hossein Haeri, Natalie Parde, Rebecca T. Feinstein
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 27

AB-RAG: Adaptive Budgeted Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Reliable Question Answering

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become the standard way to ground large language models in external knowledge, yet most systems retrieve a fixed number of passages for every question regardless of its difficulty. This wastes computation on easy questions, starves hard ones, and gives no signal for when a generated answer can be trusted.

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
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 Computation and Language
Sep 24

Cross-Lingual Legal QA for Vietnamese Labour Law: Retrieval, Translation, and Verifier-Guided Correction

The paper presents a cross‑lingual legal QA system for Vietnamese labour law, introducing a bilingual evaluation suite of 231 Vietnamese–English question–answer pairs, 75 of which are annotated for five complex legal reasoning phenomena. It evaluates a verifier‑guided pipeline that decomposes answers into claims, checks citation reachability and entailment, and corrects citation failures and contradictions, and introduces six automatic diagnostics for faithfulness to retrieved evidence. Experiments show that dense retrieval outperforms sparse and hybrid retrieval, translation placement has no significant effect on diagnostics, and verifier‑guided correction modestly improves citation preservation but not other dimensions, with human evaluation indicating a gap between automatic diagnostics and human judgments.

By Nguyen Minh Chi, Mo El-Haj, Nguyen Ha Thanh, Dawn Knight, Paul Rayson