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: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.
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 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×.
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:2609.14245v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Context compression reduces generator input in retrieval-augmented generation, but answer quality alone does not characterize citation attribution. W...
arXiv:2609.01432v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scientific citations carry rhetorical intent. Scholars may cite prior work positively (supporting), negatively (contrasting), or neutrally (mentionin...
arXiv:2606. 23989v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: End-to-end large language models (LLMs) produce fluent multi-document summaries but remain prone to hallucination, and the attributions they offer are typically coarse (whole documents or passages) and generated post hoc, leaving each summary statement hard to verify.
Large language models increasingly rely on long-form reasoning for complex tasks, yet their reasoning traces may drift away from the supplied context when evidence is sparse, noisy, or in conflict with parametric knowledge. Existing grounding methods either attach citations after generation or encourage evidence retrieval inside the trace, but they often do not ensure that cited content is sufficient for the local inference and final answer.
AtomCite is an agentic framework that verifies and corrects page‑level citations in multi‑page documents by parsing answers into claims, checking each claim against the cited page image, and applying a deterministic repair policy. The authors introduce DocCite, the first benchmark for this task, built on MP‑DocVQA and DUDE, containing 928 injected instances and 1,909 verified natural errors. Across Gemini, Claude, and GPT models, AtomCite achieves about 93% verification accuracy and improves citation precision from 34% to 87‑90%, while also enhancing hallucination detection in open‑source models.
arXiv:2609.15660v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) grounds a language model's answers on retrieved external knowledge and returns each answer with citations that i...
arXiv:2608.21376v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Many NLP tasks require systems to provide attribution in their outputs--i.e. citations to grounding sources. Attribution serves as a bulwark against...
arXiv:2606. 08036v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in academic research workflows, but scholarly tasks require high factual precision and therefore expose a key weakness: overconfidence.