arXiv Computation and Language

CiteShade: Citation Laundering in Multi-Source Retrieval-Augmented Generation and Its Counterfactual Defense

arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 9

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.

By Dongsheng Ma, Jiayu Li, Zhengren Wang, Yijie Wang, Jiahao Kong, Weijun Zeng, Jutao Xiao, Jie Yang, Bangrui Xu, Yuhan Wang, Bin Wang, Conghui He
arXiv AI
Aug 26

RAGSentinel: Certifiable Geometric Consensus for Robust Retrieval-Augmented Generation

RAGSentinel is a training‑free, label‑free defense designed for black‑box retrieval‑augmented generation systems. It employs a surrogate encoder to detect hidden‑state shifts caused by retrieved documents, removes shared topic directions, and filters poisoned documents as geometric outliers from a robust majority consensus. The method is proven to recover a poison‑free majority context under honest‑majority and representation‑separation assumptions, and experiments show it keeps attack success rates low while maintaining accuracy across multiple datasets, LLM families, and adaptive attacks.

By Yueyang Quan, Anjun Gao, Yufei Xia, Minghong Fang, Zhuqing Liu
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

Tracing Target Answers in Poisoned Retrieval Corpora via Token Influence Attribution

The paper introduces TRACE, a lightweight framework for detecting corpus poisoning in Retrieval-Augmented Generation systems. TRACE works by tracing answer-related tokens through token influence attribution, first identifying recurrent high-influence keywords across retrieved documents and then verifying their impact on model predictions. Experiments on three QA benchmarks and six large language models show that TRACE achieves strong detection performance while also revealing attacker-specified target answers.

By Yan-Lun Chen, Pin-Yu Chen, Chia-Mu Yu, Ying-Dar Lin, Yu-Sung Wu, Wei-Bin Lee
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 Machine Learning
Jul 30

RAGuard: A Layered Defense Framework for Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems Against Data Poisoning

arXiv:2607. 26339v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems ground large language models (LLMs) in external corpora, but this reliance exposes them to corpus poisoning: maliciously injected passages that manipulate retrieved evidence.

By Pushkal Kumar, Tucker Nielson, Tanish Kolhe, Shubham Zala, Vincent Li
arXiv Computation and Language
5d ago

Prevented is Not Protected: What Attack Success Rate Hides about RAG

The paper examines how Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) models are vulnerable to knowledge poisoning, where attackers manipulate retrieved evidence to alter model outputs. It critiques the common use of attack success rate (ASR) as an evaluation metric, arguing that ASR masks defense-induced failures and obscures the true mechanisms of attack prevention. To address this, the authors propose Aligned RAG Evaluation, a matched-query protocol that jointly analyzes clean and poisoned responses with and without defenses, incorporating LLM-judge endorsement and retrieval dependence controls. Experiments on HotpotQA and Natural Questions show that existing defenses can unintentionally produce target-positive answers and that evaluation criteria can shift defense rankings, revealing blind spots in ASR-based assessments.

By Chahana Dahal, Zuobin Xiong