GenProve: Learning to Generate Text with Fine-Grained Provenance
Jingxuan Wei, Xingyue Wang University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Yanghaoyu Liao University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Jie Dong, Yuchen Liu, Caijun Jia, Bihui Yu University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Junnan Zhu Institute of automation, Chinese academy of science, Chinese Academy of Sciences
原文摘要
Large language models (LLM) often hallucinate, and while adding citations is a common solution, it is frequently insufficient for accountability as users struggle to verify how a cited source supports a generated claim. Existing methods are typically coarse-grained and fail to distinguish between direct quotes and complex reasoning. In this paper, we introduce Generation-time Fine-grained Provenance, a task where models must generate fluent answers while simultaneously producing structured, sentence-level provenance triples. To enable this, we present ReFInE (Relation-aware Fine-grained Interpretability Evidence), a dataset featuring expert-verified annotations that distinguish between Quotation, Compression, and Inference. Building on ReFInE, we propose GenProve, a framework that combines Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). By optimizing a composite reward for answer fidelity and provenance correctness, GenProve significantly outperforms 14 strong LLMs in joint evaluation. Crucially, our analysis uncovers a reasoning gap where models excel at surface-level quotation but struggle significantly with inference-based provenance, suggesting that verifiable reasoning remains a frontier challenge distinct from surface-level citation.
cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表