MaxShapley: Towards Incentive-compatible Generative Search with Fair Context Attribution

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Patel, Sara, Zhou, Mingxun, Fanti, Giulia
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866914579863306240
author Patel, Sara
Zhou, Mingxun
Fanti, Giulia
author_facet Patel, Sara
Zhou, Mingxun
Fanti, Giulia
contents Generative search engines based on large language models (LLMs) are replacing traditional search, fundamentally changing how information providers are compensated. To sustain this ecosystem, we need fair mechanisms to attribute and compensate content providers based on their contributions to generated answers. We introduce MaxShapley, an efficient algorithm for fair credit attribution in generative search pipelines that retrieve external sources before generation. MaxShapley is a special case of the celebrated Shapley value; it leverages a de-composable max-sum utility function to compute attributions with polynomial-time computation in the number of documents, as opposed to the exponential cost of Shapley values. We evaluate MaxShapley on three multi-hop QA datasets (HotPotQA, MuSiQUE, MS MARCO); MaxShapley achieves comparable attribution quality to exact Shapley computation, while consuming a fraction of its tokens--for instance, it gives up to a 9x reduction in resource consumption over prior state-of-the-art methods at the same attribution accuracy. We release open-source code and re-calibrated datasets. An educational demo is available at https://fair-search.com.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_05958
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MaxShapley: Towards Incentive-compatible Generative Search with Fair Context Attribution
Patel, Sara
Zhou, Mingxun
Fanti, Giulia
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Generative search engines based on large language models (LLMs) are replacing traditional search, fundamentally changing how information providers are compensated. To sustain this ecosystem, we need fair mechanisms to attribute and compensate content providers based on their contributions to generated answers. We introduce MaxShapley, an efficient algorithm for fair credit attribution in generative search pipelines that retrieve external sources before generation. MaxShapley is a special case of the celebrated Shapley value; it leverages a de-composable max-sum utility function to compute attributions with polynomial-time computation in the number of documents, as opposed to the exponential cost of Shapley values. We evaluate MaxShapley on three multi-hop QA datasets (HotPotQA, MuSiQUE, MS MARCO); MaxShapley achieves comparable attribution quality to exact Shapley computation, while consuming a fraction of its tokens--for instance, it gives up to a 9x reduction in resource consumption over prior state-of-the-art methods at the same attribution accuracy. We release open-source code and re-calibrated datasets. An educational demo is available at https://fair-search.com.
title MaxShapley: Towards Incentive-compatible Generative Search with Fair Context Attribution
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.05958