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arXiv:2603.16138v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Generative search systems are increasingly replacing link-based retrieval with AI-generated summaries, yet little is known about how these sy...
The study measures Google AI Overviews (AIOs), noting they activate for 13.7% of queries overall and 64.7% of question-form queries, with lower rates for politically sensitive topics. AIOs cite more credible domains than typical search results, yet 30% of cited pages are not shown in the first-page results, indicating a distinct source selection process. Among 98,020 atomic claims, 11.0% lack support from cited pages, mainly due to omissions, and over half of cited pages contain display ads, reducing publisher revenue while Google’s ads remain.
arXiv:2607. 12336v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies, while serving as a foundational enabler for modern social media and digital health services, exert a bivalent effect by simultaneously acting as a combatant against and a spread vector for misinformation.
WildSEEK is a new dataset of 3,000 real user information‑seeking queries, manually annotated for risk‑sensitive domains and whether the query is factoid or analytical. The accompanying evaluation framework tests LLM responses against four failure criteria—sycophantic behavior, overreliance, a default US‑centric perspective, and poor handling of vulnerable populations—finding higher failure rates for analytical queries. The authors also train classifiers on WildSEEK to analyze over 1.8 million realistic queries, revealing that more than a third are high‑risk and often analytical.
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.
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.