Work

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

Year: 2026
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: 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 LLMas-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. 1
Language: English
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7166824498
FWCI: 9.62
Cites: 13
Cited by: 7
Related to: 10