A Citation Can Be Right Without Being Grounded
TL;DR for operators A RAG system can return the right answer, attach a source that genuinely supports that answer, and still leave one critical question unresolved: did that source actually influence the model’s answer generation? A mechanistic study of Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct finds that inline citation behavior is not controlled by one dedicated citation feature. It emerges from a distributed sequence of attention heads and MLPs that includes early entity enrichment, matching between document and question entities, mid-layer processing, and late aggregation that shifts the model toward emitting a citation marker rather than ending the sentence.1 ...