Claim-Gated Source-Risk Auditing for Generative Search

Abstract:A generative search answer can cite a supported passage yet omit a source relationship that changes its interpretation. We specify a claim-gated audit of the query-source-answer tuple. An omission is resolved only when relationship evidence, answer adoption, materiality, and disclosure are all observed; incomplete evidence remains unresolved rather than being treated as independence. The specification separates this endpoint from citation support and review priority, and binds decisions to versioned evidence spans. A reference checker makes the record contract executable. On an exhaustive synthetic suite, it reproduces all 81 three-state predicate combinations and rejects 192 deliberately malformed records. Common-guard baselines and predicate ablations isolate endpoint logic from missing-evidence handling, while controlled transitions check support separation and evidence removal. These are finite contract-conformance results, not detector accuracy or evidence of improved user outcomes. We define the independent annotation, held-out evaluation, and paired utility tests still required to establish semantic validity and deployment benefit.

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computational Complexity (cs.CC); Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science (cs.CE); Emerging Technologies (cs.ET); Information Retrieval (cs.IR)

arXiv:2609.29145 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2609.29145v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.29145 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)