Attribution in Scientific Literature: New Benchmark and Methods

arXiv:2405.02228v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) increasingly generate citation-backed responses, yet citation hallucination remains a major challenge for trustworthy scientific information access. We introduce REASONS, a benchmark of 12,723 sentence-level citation instances spanning 12 arXiv subject categories, designed to evaluate scientific citation attribution under varying evidence conditions. We propose a dual-metric framework consisting of Abstention Rate (AR) and Hallucination Rate (HR) to characterize the trade-off between reliability and responsiveness. Using author-attribution and title-attribution tasks, we evaluate proprietary and open-source LLMs under zero-context, metadata-augmented, cascaded metadata-augmented prompting (CMP), retrieval-augmented, and adversarial settings. Advanced RAG lowers HR relative to Naive RAG (65.4% vs. 87.6%) but reduces AR from 5.0% to 0%. Under adversarial metadata, several systems exceed 85% HR, while retrieval-augmented variants frequently maintain near-zero abstention. Human evaluation of 1,000 outputs ($\kappa=0.78$) finds a 12.7:1 ratio of factual hallucinations to acceptable paraphrases. Our findings demonstrate that citation attribution systems should be evaluated not only for correctness but also for their ability to abstain appropriately under uncertainty. REASONS provides a benchmark and evaluation framework for studying attribution reliability in citation generation.

Abstract:Large language models (LLMs) increasingly generate citation-backed responses, yet citation hallucination remains a major challenge for trustworthy scientific information access. We introduce REASONS, a benchmark of 12,723 sentence-level citation instances spanning 12 arXiv subject categories, designed to evaluate scientific citation attribution under varying evidence conditions. We propose a dual-metric framework consisting of Abstention Rate (AR) and Hallucination Rate (HR) to characterize the trade-off between reliability and responsiveness. Using author-attribution and title-attribution tasks, we evaluate proprietary and open-source LLMs under zero-context, metadata-augmented, cascaded metadata-augmented prompting (CMP), retrieval-augmented, and adversarial settings. Advanced RAG lowers HR relative to Naive RAG (65.4% vs. 87.6%) but reduces AR from 5.0% to 0%. Under adversarial metadata, several systems exceed 85% HR, while retrieval-augmented variants frequently maintain near-zero abstention. Human evaluation of 1,000 outputs ($\kappa=0.78$) finds a 12.7:1 ratio of factual hallucinations to acceptable paraphrases. Our findings demonstrate that citation attribution systems should be evaluated not only for correctness but also for their ability to abstain appropriately under uncertainty. REASONS provides a benchmark and evaluation framework for studying attribution reliability in citation generation.

Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Information Retrieval (cs.IR)

arXiv:2405.02228 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2405.02228v4 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2405.02228 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.

Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.

analiza aiqbench

Attribution in Scientific Literature: New Benchmark and Methods

Subiecte conexe