Are Finer Citations Always Better? Rethinking Granularity for Attributed Generation

Excerpt

arXiv:2604.01432v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Citation granularity -- whether to cite individual sentences, paragraphs, or documents -- is a critical design choice in attributed generation. While fine-grained citations are commonly preferred for precise human verification, their impact on model performance remains under-explored. We analyze four model scales (8B-120B) and demonstrate that enforcing fine-grained (sentence-level) citations forfeits gains of 2-97% (median 40%) relative to the