arXiv Computation and Language By Hexuan Wang, Jingyu Zhang, Benjamin Van Durme, Daniel Khashabi

Are Finer Citations Always Better? Rethinking Granularity for Attributed Generation

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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."

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