CiteFix: Enhancing RAG Accuracy Through Post-Processing Citation Correction

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Maheshwari, Harsh, Tenneti, Srikanth, Nakkiran, Alwarappan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Maheshwari, Harsh
Tenneti, Srikanth
Nakkiran, Alwarappan
author_facet Maheshwari, Harsh
Tenneti, Srikanth
Nakkiran, Alwarappan
contents Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a powerful application of Large Language Models (LLMs), revolutionizing information search and consumption. RAG systems combine traditional search capabilities with LLMs to generate comprehensive answers to user queries, ideally with accurate citations. However, in our experience of developing a RAG product, LLMs often struggle with source attribution, aligning with other industry studies reporting citation accuracy rates of only about 74% for popular generative search engines. To address this, we present efficient post-processing algorithms to improve citation accuracy in LLM-generated responses, with minimal impact on latency and cost. Our approaches cross-check generated citations against retrieved articles using methods including keyword + semantic matching, fine tuned model with BERTScore, and a lightweight LLM-based technique. Our experimental results demonstrate a relative improvement of 15.46% in the overall accuracy metrics of our RAG system. This significant enhancement potentially enables a shift from our current larger language model to a relatively smaller model that is approximately 12x more cost-effective and 3x faster in inference time, while maintaining comparable performance. This research contributes to enhancing the reliability and trustworthiness of AI-generated content in information retrieval and summarization tasks which is critical to gain customer trust especially in commercial products.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_15629
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CiteFix: Enhancing RAG Accuracy Through Post-Processing Citation Correction
Maheshwari, Harsh
Tenneti, Srikanth
Nakkiran, Alwarappan
Information Retrieval
Computation and Language
Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a powerful application of Large Language Models (LLMs), revolutionizing information search and consumption. RAG systems combine traditional search capabilities with LLMs to generate comprehensive answers to user queries, ideally with accurate citations. However, in our experience of developing a RAG product, LLMs often struggle with source attribution, aligning with other industry studies reporting citation accuracy rates of only about 74% for popular generative search engines. To address this, we present efficient post-processing algorithms to improve citation accuracy in LLM-generated responses, with minimal impact on latency and cost. Our approaches cross-check generated citations against retrieved articles using methods including keyword + semantic matching, fine tuned model with BERTScore, and a lightweight LLM-based technique. Our experimental results demonstrate a relative improvement of 15.46% in the overall accuracy metrics of our RAG system. This significant enhancement potentially enables a shift from our current larger language model to a relatively smaller model that is approximately 12x more cost-effective and 3x faster in inference time, while maintaining comparable performance. This research contributes to enhancing the reliability and trustworthiness of AI-generated content in information retrieval and summarization tasks which is critical to gain customer trust especially in commercial products.
title CiteFix: Enhancing RAG Accuracy Through Post-Processing Citation Correction
topic Information Retrieval
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.15629