Attributable Post-Rationalization in RAG Citations: A Controlled Reproduction and an RLVR Comparison

📅 2026-09-19
📈 Citations: 0
Influential: 0
📄 PDF
🤖 AI Summary
研究解决了RAG系统中不忠实引用的问题,通过比较RLVR训练的模型与基础模型在四个数据集上的表现,发现RLVR未能改善引用的真实性。
📝 Abstract
A RAG system can hand you the right answer and cite a source it did not actually use. Models output these unfaithful citations via post-rationalization: they write the answer first and then attach a citation to whatever passage looks close enough. Search agents are now trained with reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR), which pays them for getting the answer right. We asked whether that training also teaches them to cite honestly. Improving an existing methodology with a required control, we compared an instruction-tuned model against three RLVR agents trained from it, on four question-answering datasets, using only free-tier Kaggle GPUs. Post-rationalization is everywhere: on Wikipedia-based questions roughly one citation in seven is unfaithful. RLVR does not fix it. The agents post-rationalize at their base model's rate, and one lands slightly worse. Rewarding correct answers buys nothing in citation faithfulness, so faithfulness has to be trained and measured on its own terms.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

RAG
post-rationalization
citation faithfulness
RLVR
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

Post-Rationalization
RLVR
Citation Faithfulness
🔎 Similar Papers
M
Mehedi Khan
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology
M
Md. Shariful Islam Bhuyan
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology