CiteGuard: Faithful Citation Attribution for LLMs via Retrieval-Augmented Validation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Choi, Yee Man, Guo, Xuehang, Fung, Yi R., Wang, Qingyun
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Choi, Yee Man
Guo, Xuehang
Fung, Yi R.
Wang, Qingyun
author_facet Choi, Yee Man
Guo, Xuehang
Fung, Yi R.
Wang, Qingyun
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful assistants for scientific writing. However, concerns remain about the quality and reliability of the generated text, including citation accuracy and faithfulness. While most recent work relies on methods such as LLM-as-a-Judge, the reliability of LLM-as-a-Judge alone is also in doubt. In this work, we reframe citation evaluation as a problem of citation attribution alignment, which assesses whether LLM-generated citations match those a human author would include for the same text. We propose CiteGuard, a retrieval-aware agent framework designed to provide more faithful grounding for citation validation. CiteGuard improves over the prior baseline by 10 percentage points and achieves up to 68.1% accuracy on the CiteME benchmark, approaching human performance (69.2%). It also identifies alternative valid citations and demonstrates generalization ability for cross-domain citation attribution. Our code is available at https://github.com/KathCYM/CiteGuard.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_17853
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CiteGuard: Faithful Citation Attribution for LLMs via Retrieval-Augmented Validation
Choi, Yee Man
Guo, Xuehang
Fung, Yi R.
Wang, Qingyun
Digital Libraries
Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful assistants for scientific writing. However, concerns remain about the quality and reliability of the generated text, including citation accuracy and faithfulness. While most recent work relies on methods such as LLM-as-a-Judge, the reliability of LLM-as-a-Judge alone is also in doubt. In this work, we reframe citation evaluation as a problem of citation attribution alignment, which assesses whether LLM-generated citations match those a human author would include for the same text. We propose CiteGuard, a retrieval-aware agent framework designed to provide more faithful grounding for citation validation. CiteGuard improves over the prior baseline by 10 percentage points and achieves up to 68.1% accuracy on the CiteME benchmark, approaching human performance (69.2%). It also identifies alternative valid citations and demonstrates generalization ability for cross-domain citation attribution. Our code is available at https://github.com/KathCYM/CiteGuard.
title CiteGuard: Faithful Citation Attribution for LLMs via Retrieval-Augmented Validation
topic Digital Libraries
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.17853