arXiv AI

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.

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
Jun 2

Med-V1: Small Language Models for Zero-shot and Scalable Biomedical Evidence Attribution

arXiv:2603. 05308v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Assessing whether an article supports an assertion is essential for hallucination detection and claim verification.

By Qiao Jin, Yin Fang, Lauren He, Yifan Yang, Guangzhi Xiong, Zhizheng Wang, Nicholas Wan, Joey Chan, Donald C. Comeau, Robert Leaman, Charalampos S. Floudas, Aidong Zhang, Michael F. Chiang, Yifan Peng, Zhiyong Lu
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 11

Authority, Truth, and Citation Bias: A Large-Scale Multi-Domain Benchmark for Studying Epistemic Susceptibility in Large Language Models

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.

arXiv Computation and Language
1d ago

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
Jul 3

MultAttnAttrib: Training-Free Multimodal Attribution in Long Document Question Answering

arXiv:2607. 01420v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As grounded QA systems are increasingly deployed in AI assistants, accurately attributing generated answers to evidence is critical for user trust and model safety.

By Dang Quang Thien Tran, Quang V. Dang, Vinamra Tyagi, Sai Soorya Rao Veeravalli, Trang Nguyen, Ryan A. Rossi, Franck Dernoncourt, Nedim Lipka, Koustava Goswami, Samyadeep Basu