# $\mathcal{A}^3$ : Automatic Alignment Framework for Attributed Text Generation Yue Wang $^{1,2*}$ , Haoke Zhang $^{1,2*}$ , Juntao Li $^{1,2\dagger}$ , Jinxiong Chang $^{3}$ , Min Zhang $^{1,2}$ $^{1}$ School of Computer Science and Technology, Soochow University $^{2}$ Key Laboratory of Data Intelligence and Advanced Computing, Soochow University 3Ant Group ywangnlp,hkzhangnlp@stu.suda.edu.cn ljt, minzhang@suda.edu.cn # Abstract Attributed text generation aims to enhance the reliability of content generated from large language models by providing citations for each claim, which thereby enables users to easily verify the correctness of the responses. However, the scarcity of high-quality training samples presents a significant challenge in aligning large language models to generate texts with citations, revealing considerable room for improvement in existing attribution systems. Besides, existing approaches of aligning large language models to follow user instructions can lead to an undue emphasis on irrelevant documents, which in turn reduces the quality of responses. To address the above problems, we propose Automatic Alignment Framework for Attributed Text Generation $(\mathcal{A}^3)$ , a novel framework designed to automatically generate high-quality attributed query-response pairs for both supervised fine-tuning and preference optimization stages without human annotation. With the help of $\mathcal{A}^3$ , Mistral-7B can achieve a citation recall of 84.4 and a precision of 87.0 precision on ASQA, which notably surpasses GPT-4's citation recall of 73.0 and precision of 76.5. # 1 Introduction Recently, due to the convenience of natural language interaction, an increasing number of users prefer to employ Large Language Models (LLMs) for their information-seeking needs. However, despite the abundant knowledge obtained during pretraining, the outputs of LLMs can sometimes deviate from user instructions and contain hallucinations, significantly constraining their ability to satisfy information-seeking needs (Zhang et al., 2023b). Furthermore, due to the lack of clear attributions, it is also difficult to check the correctness of content generated from LLMs (Asai et al., 2024b). Therefore, to better satisfy the information-seeking needs, attributed text generation has recently gained significant attention from both academics and industry, which aims to enhance the reliability of generated content by providing citations for each claim (Li et al., 2023a). Despite the significant importance of attributed text generation, existing open-source attribution systems exhibit considerable room for improvement. In the era of LLMs, constructing an attribution system typically involves a two-step process (Gao et al., 2023b; Malaviya et al., 2023). Firstly, an external retriever is used to get relevant passages. Subsequently, these passages, along with the user query, are incorporated into carefully designed templates. Finally, these templates serve as the input of LLMs and guide them to generate responses with proper citations. However, since existing LLMs are designed to follow user instructions, this approach can lead to models generating content based on irrelevant retrieved passages, thus undermining the quality of the attribution. Moreover, even if provided with relevant passages, it is still challenging to rely only on the task generalization capabilities of LLMs to follow user instructions and generate responses with correct citations that align with the question (Gao et al., 2023b). Overall, the lack of high-quality open-source data hinders the development of attributed text generation. The challenge of obtaining high-quality open-source attributed text generation training data stems from several reasons. Firstly, the high cost of human annotation makes large-scale, human-annotated datasets unaffordable, which results in the necessity of automatic data generation. Besides, while existing commercial attribution systems, such as Bing Chat and perplexity.ai, have achieved success, the open-source community can ![](images/d03c18167a96a0af804e6b4ca48da68c9d02532a6f9dca6d05a343e551da85f0.jpg) ![](images/b88a3327a708f3231c767fcf177ce96e186fa14376154c3e63ffdb1c98c466f2.jpg) Figure 1: An illustration of our $\mathcal{A}^3$ framework, including two main processes: Data Construction and Model Training. During the data construction process, we first introduce an (a) entity matching based document clustering strategy to select multiple interrelated documents. Next, we proceed with (b) Q&A Pair Extraction & Noisy Document Augmentation using the selected documents to generate Q&A pairs that serve as the SFT training data. Following this step, (c) Automatic Dispreferred Response Construction involves using the responses from (b) as preferred responses and altering these responses by removing, changing, or adding citations, or by emphasizing irrelevant documents to construct dispreferred responses. During the model training process, we utilize the constructed data to perform (I) Supervised Fine-tuning and (II) Preference Optimization. not benefit from these commercial systems. Specifically, since there is no open access to the API of Bing Chat and it does not contain citations in the responses from the API of Perplexity.Ai, we can not use these commercial systems to generate attributed query-response as training data. Besides, due to the inability to obtain results of commercial systems on academic benchmarks, we can not directly compare our models with commercial systems like Bing Chat and Perplexity.Ai, which also hinders the development of this task. Finally, despite the strong general ability, the performance of existing LLMs (e.g., GPT-4) is far from satisfactory, which leads to poor results in directly using existing LLMs to generate attributed text generation data (Kamalloo et al., 2023). To tackle the aforementioned challenges, we introduce a novel framework, the Automatic Alignment Framework for Attributed Text Generation $(\mathcal{A}^3)$ , which leverages underperforming attributed LLMs to automatically generate high-quality attributed text generation data without the need for human-annotated datasets. To achieve this goal, the $\mathcal{A}^3$ framework breaks down the difficult attributed text generation task into simple solvable ones, e.g., document clustering, text summarization, text entailment, etc. Specifically, the $\mathcal{A}^3$ framework comprises two main processes: data construction and model training. During the data construction process, we start by employing both entity-matching method and embedding-based method to cluster multiple documents on relevant topics. Then, we utilize LLMs to construct Q&A pairs based on these interrelated documents. To reduce the effect of irrelevant documents, we introduce a noisy document augmentation strategy for constructing supervised fine-tuning data, alongside four strategies to generate dispreferred responses for the preference optimization stage. Finally, these constructed data are utilized in the model training process. In conclusion, our work has the following contributions: - We introduce the $\mathcal{A}^3$ framework, which can automatically generate high-quality training samples for attributed text generation without requiring human annotations; - Leveraging $\mathcal{A}^3$ , the Mistral-7B model achieves a citation recall of 84.4 and precision of 87.0 on ASQA, markedly outperforming GPT-4, which achieves a citation recall of 73.0 and precision of 76.5; - Our experimental results also demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework in reducing the effects of noisy documents and avoiding irrelevant citations. # 2 Automatic Alignment Framework for Attributed Text Generation # 2.1 Attribute Text Generation Task Setup In our work, the passages $P_{i}$ are sourced from Wikipedia and retrieved by an external retriever according to the query $Q_{i}$ . Each passage $p_{i}$ consists of one or more sentences and is 100 words in length. Given a query $Q_{i}$ and the corresponding retrieved passages $P_{i} = \{p_{1}, p_{2}, \ldots, p_{n}\}$ , attributed text generation aims to generate a response $R_{i}$ along with citations $C_{i} = \{c_{1}, c_{2}, \ldots, c_{m}\}$ . Each citation within $C_{i}$ is an index of one of the retrieved passages $p_{i}$ . We show an example pair in Table 1. # 2.2 Overview of Our Framework To construct an effective attribution system at a low cost, we introduce the framework $\mathcal{A}^3$ , which consists of a data construction process and a model training process. To achieve this goal, the $\mathcal{A}^3$ framework breaks down the complex task of attributed text generation into simpler, more manageable tasks, such as document clustering, text summarization, and text entailment. An illustration of our framework is shown in Figure 1. In the data construction process, we focus on generating a training set $D_{train} = \{d_i\}$ for attributed text generation, where $d_i$ represents $(Q_i, P_i, R_i, C_i)$ . Due to the high cost of human annotation, our framework aims to automatically generate $D = \{d_i\}$ based on existing corpus $D_{corpus} = \{p_1, p_2, \ldots, p_N\}$ (such as Wikipedia), where $N$ denotes the number of passages in $D_{corpus}$ . Specifically, during data construction, we generate $(Q_i, R_i, C_i)$ based on the $P_i$ . We introduce quite a few strategies to ensure the generated data quality for the Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Preference Optimization (PO) stages. Next, we introduce the data construction process of both the SFT and PO stages and the model training process. In this work, both 'citation' and 'evidence' refer to source references supporting claims in generated responses, while 'doc ument' and 'passage' both denote text segments within the corpus. # 2.3 Data Construction for Supervised Fine-tuning In the SFT stage, to generate an SFT training sample $d_{i}$ , we first select interrelated documents $P_{i} = \{p_{1}, p_{2}, \ldots, p_{n}\}$ from $D_{\text{corpus}}$ with the use of an entity matching based document clustering strategy, where $n$ denotes the number of selected documents. Then, we use LLMs to generate $(Q_{i}, R_{i}, C_{i})$ based on the selected $P_{i}$ . Finally, a data filtering strategy and a noisy document augmentation strategy are introduced to enhance the SFT data quality. # 2.3.1 Interrelated Document Selection Interrelated document selection aims to generate coherent questions with multi-source citations, rather than artificially combining unrelated passages. There are two alternatives for the interrelated document selection. The first and simpler one is that if the number of selected documents $n = 1$ , we pick up one passage $p_i$ from $D_{corpus}$ randomly. For the other one, we need to select more than two documents from $D_{corpus}$ for $(Q_i, P_i, R_i, C_i)$ pair construction. This phenomenon results from that the randomly selected documents are not interrelated. Therefore, we introduce an entity matching based document clustering strategy to select interrelated documents. Specifically, we use WikiGraphs (Wang et al., 2021) as $D_{corpus}$ . WikiGraphs consists of lots of entity edges $Edge_i = (entity_a, entity_b, r)$ , which represents $entity_a$ has relation $r$ to $entity_b$ . Besides, $entity_a$ and $entity_b$ links to $P_a$ and $P_b$ respectively, where $P_a$ and $P_b$ represents Wikipedia passages $\{p_1, p_2, \ldots, p_n\}$ . Focusing on a specific entity, we gather a set of Wikipedia passages linked to entities that have a relationship $r$ with our target entity. To further uncover interconnected paragraphs within these passages, we seek out sections that feature more than two entities as interrelated documents $P_i = \{p_1, p_2, \ldots, p_n\}$ . Finally, based on our data generation budget, we randomly selected 31,823 entity triples from WikiGraphs. # 2.3.2 Q&A Pair Extraction After selecting interrelated documents $P_{i} = \{p_{1}, p_{2}, \ldots, p_{n}\}$ , we use gpt-4-1106-preview to generate attributed Q&A pair $(Q_{i}, R_{i}, C_{i})$ . If the number of selected documents $n = 1$ , recognizing
Query:When did the Battle of Rennell Island occur and why is it significant in the context of World War II's Guadalcanal campaign?
Retrieved Passages:Document [1] The Battle of Rennell Island took place on 29 – 30 January 1943 . . .Document [2] ...it was the last major naval engagement between the United States Navy and the Imperial Japanese Navy during the Guadalcanal campaign of World War II . .Document [3] . .Document [4] == Goalball == Rzepecki is a goalball player , .Document [5] Aviva Premiership rugby union teams are based in London , . .
Preferred Response:The Battle of Rennell Island occurred on 29-30 January 1943 and is significant because it was the last major naval engagement between the United States Navy and the Imperial Japanese Navy during the Guadalcanal campaign of World War II [1][2][3].
Dispreferred Response:The Battle of Rennell Island occurred on 29-30 January 1943 and is significant because it was the last major naval engagement between the United States Navy and the Imperial Japanese Navy during the Guadalcanal campaign of World War II [1][2][3][5].
Table 1: A example of our generated dataset. In real-world scenarios, retrieval systems inevitably retrieve irrelevant documents. Therefore, to simulate real-world scenarios and reduce the effect of irrelevant documents, we select random passages as noisy retrieved passages, which are shown as Gray. Red represents wrong modifications caused by our preference data construction strategies. that generating a question for a given response is more straightforward than answering a question, we use LLMs to generate a summary for this document $p_1$ and treat this summary as response $R_i$ . Subsequently, we task the LLMs with generating question $Q_i$ based on $R_i$ . Afterward, we add the citation $c_1$ linked with $p_1$ as $C_i$ . If the number of selected documents $n \geq 2$ , to improve the speed of data construction, we generate multiple attributed Q&A pairs based on $P_i$ . The model will output multiple pairs of Q&A, and we extract them using regular expressions. We show the prompt templates in the appendix. Each triple corresponds to one document cluster, with half of the clusters containing a single document and the other half containing multiple documents. We generate one QA-pair for one document cluster. Therefore, we initially extract a total of 31,823 samples. # 2.3.3 Data Filtering To conduct data filtering, we remove generated samples with low citation quality. We choose the citation quality criterion introduced from ALCE (Gao et al., 2023b) to evaluate the citation quality for each generated sample $(Q_{i},P_{i},R_{i},C_{i})$ . Specifically, each response is divided into multiple statements and the NLI model4 is used to determine whether each statement is fully supportive or not fully supportive. Citation recall is a metric to evaluate whether the cited passages fully support the content of the response, which is calculated by the average support ratio of all the claims in the response. Citation precision is employed to identify irrelevant citations. A citation becomes irrelevant to a statement when it fails to substantiate the statement, yet the remaining citations continue to support the statement without it. Citation precision is calculated by the average relevant ratio of all the citations in the response. Finally, we remove samples whose Citation F1 is below a threshold, which is computed as follows: $$ C i t a t i o n F 1 = 2 \times \frac {C i t a t i o n \text {P r e c i s i o n} \times \text {C i t a t i o n R e c a l l}}{C i t a t i o n \text {P r e c i s i o n} + \text {C i t a t i o n R e c a l l}} $$ In implementation, we set filtering threshold as 0.9 for data filtering. Finally, after filtering, we keep 13,225 samples. # 2.3.4 Noisy Document Augmentation Due to the limitation of retrieval systems, the retrieved passages are difficult to avoid containing some irrelevant information. To address the above challenge, we introduce a noisy document augmentation strategy. Specifically, we first select some random documents from $D_{\text{corpus}}$ as irrelevant documents and add them to the documents set $\{p_1, p_2, \ldots, p_n\}$ . Then we shuffle the order of the final documents set $P_i$ and change $\{c_1, c_2, \ldots, c_m\}$ to ensure they link with the correct passage. # 2.3.5 Extending to Different Data Source Given that the entity-based document clustering method is restricted to data with structured information, we also leverage data sources lacking structured information for data generation. This is to showcase the flexible extensibility of our framework. Specifically, we use the ArXiver dataset as data source. This dataset encompasses 63,357 arXiv papers published from January 2023 to October 2023. To obtain interrelated documents, we utilize the gte-modernbert -base model $^{6}$ to compute the relevance between each pair of documents within the same category. If two documents exhibit the highest mutual relevance, we retain this pair. In the implementation process, to ensure that an adequate number of relevant documents can be identified for each category, we select categories containing no fewer than 500 documents. In total, 34 such categories are identified. To guarantee data diversity, we limit the retention to a maximum of 200 category pairs per category. Ultimately, a total of 5,171 pairs of interrelated documents are obtained. Subsequently, due to the excessive length of the documents, we use regular expressions to extract crucial information from each document, such as claims, conclusions, or theorems from the papers. Then, we calculate the overlap and retain the most overlapping strings from each pair of documents. During the Q&A Pair Extraction stage, taking into account the balance between cost and performance, we use Doubao-1.5-Pro-32k for data generation, resulting in a total of 19,924 QA pairs. In the data filtering stage, we utilize the t5-xxl -true-nli-mixture model $^{7}$ and removes samples with a citation F1 score below 0.9. Finally, 1,275 samples are retained. # 2.4 Data Construction for Preference Optimization In the PO stage, we use $R_{i}$ as the preferred response and design four strategies to automatically generate corresponding dispreferred response $DR_{i}$ with incorrect citations $DC_{i}$ : - Random Citation Adding: To prevent LLMs from including excessive incorrect citations, we add some citations randomly to construct a dispreferred response; - Random Citation Removing: We remove some golden citations to construct a dispreferred response, which aims to avoid the miss of key citations; - Random Citation Changing: To avoid referencing irrelevant documents, we substitute some key citations with random ones as a dispreferred response; - Irrelevant Document Focusing: To discourage LLMs from focusing on irrelevant documents, we first remove documents related to responses and retain only irrelevant documents. Then, we use LLMs to answer the given questions based on these irrelevant documents, employing these answers as dispreferred responses. # 3 Experiments # 3.1 Backbone and Baselines To confirm the generalization of our framework, we select two families of LLMs as backbone models: LLaMA2 (Touvron et al., 2023), LLaMA3 (Grattafori et al., 2024) and Mistral (Jiang et al., 2023). For the LLaMA2 family, we select two models with different sizes: LLaMA2-7B and LLaMA2-13B. For the Mistral family, we select Mistral-7B. We use ChatGPT (gpt-3.5-turbo-0301) with a 4K context window for most main experiments and ablations. We also report results with ChatGPT-16K (gpt3.5-turbo-16k0613) and GPT-4 (gpt-4-0613;8K context window). For open-source models, we evaluate LLaMA and its chat versions. Besides, we also compare our framework with Hagrid (Kamalloo et al., 2023), Self-RAG (Asai et al., 2024a), and CaLM (Hsu et al., 2024). Hagrid (Kamalloo et al., 2023) is an SFT dataset for attributed text generation, which consists of 3,214 samples; Self-RAG (Asai et al., 2024a) aims to make LLMs decide whether need to retrieve documents through self-reflection; CaLM (Hsu et al., 2024) empowers smaller LMs to validate the output of larger LMs. # 3.2 Benchmark To fully confirm the effectiveness, we evaluate our proposed framework and all the baselines on one short-form QA dataset PopQA (Mallen et al., 2023), two long-form QA datasets ALCE-ASQA and ALCE-ELI5 (Gao et al., 2023b), and FanOutQA (Zhu et al., 2024). POPQA is constructed from Wikidata knowledge triples spanning 16 relationship types, converted into natural-language questions using manually annotated templates to ensure entity-centric factual coverage. ASQA and ELI5 are long-form, open-ended QA datasets. ASQA is built upon the AMBIGQA dataset (Min et al., 2020), and augments questions with crowdsourced long-form answers that synthesize multiple valid short answers into coherent
MethodNum.ASQAELI5PopQA Correct Acc.FanOutQA Correct Loose.
Correct EM Rec.Citation Rec.Prec.Correct ClaimCitation Rec.Prec.
LLaMA3.1-8B (Dubey et al., 2024)-27.22.44.17.72.55.317.319.8
LLaMA3.1-8B-Hagrid (Kamalloo et al., 2023)3,21428.649.750.36.917.619.330.921.7
LLaMA3.1-8B-\(A^3\)-SFT-Wiki13,22531.380.079.87.640.440.235.834.2
LLaMA3.1-8B-\(A^3\)-PO-Wiki13,22532.582.783.27.448.851.850.039.0
LLaMA3.1-8B-\(A^3\)-SFT-Wiki&arXiv14,50032.081.580.67.942.841.037.133.1
LLaMA3.1-8B-\(A^3\)-PO-Wiki&arXiv14,50032.984.183.97.650.352.949.840.3
LLaMA2-70B-Chat (Touvron et al., 2023)-41.562.961.312.838.337.9-51.4
GPT-3.5-Turbo (OpenAI, 2023b)-40.473.672.512.051.150.0-42.5
GPT-4 (OpenAI, 2023a)-41.373.076.514.248.553.4-38.2
GPT-4o (OpenAI, 2024)-42.368.575.6-----
GPT-3.5-Turbo-CalM (Hsu et al., 2024)-45.078.072.612.951.946.6--
summaries; ELI5 is derived from the Reddit forum 'Explain Like I'm Five'. FanOutQA is constructed using 1,034 high-quality, human-authored questions and 7,305 sub-question decompositions created by undergraduate and graduate students in AI/NLP courses at the University of Pennsylvania, with answers anchored to 4,121 distinct English Wikipedia articles. Given that our data is sourced from Wikipedia passages, and ELI5 data is collected from Reddit, the performance of the ELI5 model can alleviate concerns regarding performance improvements potentially stemming from data contamination. Additionally, we incorporate arXiv as a data source, which also contributes to performance enhancements and addresses this concern. We further carry out a comprehensive analysis by computing the BLEU scores between all questions in our training set and those in the ASQA and PopQA datasets. The findings reveal that no question pair had a BLEU score surpassing 0.9. This suggests that there is no substantial textual overlap between the datasets, thus effectively reducing the risk of data contamination. # 3.3 Main Results In Table 2, we report the results of our framework and all the baselines. With the help of our framework, the open-source backbone models can achieve strong citation performance, which can outperform powerful closed-sourced models significantly. Besides, our framework can bring significant improvements to all the backbone models on all three datasets, which fully shows the generalization of $\mathcal{A}^3$ . The ablation study of the SFT and PO stages also shows the effectiveness of our strate Table 2: The performance of all the baseline and our proposed framework on ASQA, ELI5, and PopQA. Bold indicates the best performance. EM, Rec., Prec. and Acc. denote Exact Match, Recall, Precision, and Accuracy. For FanOutQA, we conducted experiments under the setting of the evidence provided and context limited. Loose denotes loose accuracy. Wiki denotes we only use Wikipedia as data source, while Wiki&arXiv means we use both Wikipedia and arXiv as data source. Num. denotes the number of training samples.
FilteringNoisyNum.ASQA
Correct EM Rec.Citation Rec.Prec.
T5Random14,50030.981.780.0
T5Cat.14,50032.081.580.6
T5Sub-Cat.14,50030.177.276.5
BERTRandom14,79030.780.580.2
BERTCat.14,79031.381.080.9
BERTSub-Cat.14,79030.578.477.6
Table 3: The performance of different data filtering and noisy document augmentation strategies on ASQA. The backbone model is LLaMA3.1-8B and the data source is both Wikipedia and arXiv. T5 denotes we use t5-xxl-true-nli-mixture model to filter data, while BERT denotes ModernBERT-base-nli. Random denotes we use documents from different arXiv categories as noisy documents. Cat. denote we use use documents with the same arXiv category as noisy documents, while SubCat. denote we use use documents with the same arXiv sub-category as noisy documents. gies for each stage. PO stages can bring significant improvements in the caution quality. Depite the strong citation performance, the correctness of our framework is below powerful closed-sourced models. We think this phenomenon may result from the limitation of the model size. Furthermore, it can be observed that integrating data from diverse sources leads to enhanced performance. This effectively validates the generalizability of our framework. We report the performance of different backbone models in the appendix. # 3.4 The Effect of Data Filtering and Noisy Document Augmentation Strategies To analyze our framework further, we also study the effect of data filtering and noisy document aug ![](images/f08e6522172457b8eaafa5bd1517fa0e6dcdd76c8c8296be6c451f5c9f56bd6c.jpg) Figure 2: The effect of the filtering threshold in the SFT stage. We use Citation F1 score as filtering threshold and report the performance on ASQA when using LLaMA2-7B as backbone models. ![](images/ffc9230f0c2d174674c57b9dc0d9ef720b8fe26f947cd39f38254e63c9d7c88b.jpg) Figure 3: The effect of the data number in the SFT stage. We report the performance on ASQA when using LLaMA2-7B as backbone models. mentation strategies. From the results in Figure 2, we can find that only a high filtering threshold can bring benefits, which shows that data quality is more important than data number. # 3.5 Data Filtering & Number Analysis We report the results when generating different numbers of data in Figure 3 and 4. With the same filtering threshold, the performance is improved with the increasing of the SFT data, which is shown in Figure 3. When the SFT data number is more than 5,000, the improvements are not significant. In Figure 4, we can find that when the DPO data number is less than 9,000, there is a clear linear relationship, namely, as the DPO data increases, ![](images/92b0937a974572101f0c8b91f28e1a53222887af180a398bc4ceff305dc5df8f.jpg) Figure 4: The effect of the data number in the PO stage. We report the performance on ASQA when using LLaMA2-7B as backbone models. performance improves, which fully confirms the effectiveness of our proposed framework. When the DPO data number is more than 9,000, the improvements are not significant. In Figure 3, we evaluate the performance of different data filtering models and noisy documents strategies. Specifically, we compare the performance of t5-xxl-true-nli-mixture and ModernBERT-base-nli. We can observe that ModernBERT-base-nli may keep more samples while decreasing the performance. Therefore, we finally use t5-xxl-true-nli-mixture to filter data. We also find using the documents with same category and different sub-categories as noisy document can achieve the best performance. If noisy documents are too relevant, the performance may decrease. # 3.6 Human Evaluation We conduct a human evaluation on 100 randomly selected samples from our dataset. Following Self-RAG (Asai et al., 2024a), we evaluate from two dimensions: relevance (the output's appropriateness and topic alignment with the question) and supportiveness (the sufficiency of provided evidence for answer validation). We recruited three undergraduate students as annotators. We calculated the inter-annotator agreement using Spearman's correlation coefficient, which resulted in a value of 0.72. The results show that $84\%$ of the samples were classified as relevant and $78\%$ as supportive. These results confirm the high quality of our dataset. We
Input:Write a high-quality answer for the given question using only the provided search results and cite them properly using [1][2][3]. Question: Who wrote the song i'm not going to miss you? Document [1](Title: I'm Not Gonna Miss You): part of the soundtrack for "" which premiered on October 24, 2014. I'm Not Gonna Miss You "I'm Not Gonna Miss You" is a song recorded by ... Document [2](Title: I'm Not Gonna Miss You): I'm Not Gonna Miss You "I'm Not Gonna Miss You" is a song recorded by American country music artist Glen Campbell and The Wrecking Crew... Document [3](Title: Don't Miss You (Ricki-Lee Coulter song)): Don't Miss You (Ricki-Lee Coulter song) "Don't Miss You" is a song performed by Australian singer-songwriter, Ricki-Lee Coulter... Document [4](Title: I'm Not Gonna Miss You): Grammy Award for Best Country Song. "I'm Not Gonna Miss You" was initiated by Julian Raymond who pitched an idea of recording the song to James Keach... Document [5](Title: Don't Miss You (Ricki-Lee Coulter song)): physical release of "Don't Miss You", Coulter held instore appearances at Westfield Shopping Centres in Victoria, New South Wales... Answer:
OutputThe song "I'm Not Gonna Miss You" was co-written by Glen Campbell and producer Julian Raymond [1][2].
Table 4: A example of responses generated by LLaMA2-7B- $\mathcal{A}^3$ -PO on the ASQA dataset. conduct the human evaluation with three annotators. We calculate the inter-annotator agreement using Spearman's correlation coefficient, which results in a value of 0.72. # 3.7 Case Study In Table 4, we show results predicted by LLaMA2-7B- $\mathcal{A}^3$ -PO on the ASQA dataset. We can observe that the response is fluent, relevant to the question, and contains proper citations. Besides, through our error analysis, we identify two primary types of issues: failure to utilize information from multiple documents and retrieval of unrelated documents. Specifically, for the former, the model sometimes struggles to integrate information from multiple documents to generate accurate answers. Instead, it occasionally copies irrelevant sentences from a single document, which affects the overall quality of the response. Regarding the latter, some errors are due to the retrieval of documents that are not relevant to the question. # 4 Related Work LLM Alignment Existing LLM alignment works mainly consist of two methods: supervised instruction tuning and reinforcement learning. Supervised instruction tuning leverages collected supervised instruction datasets to train foundation models to deal with diverse instructions. Early instruction datasets are collected from large-scale existing NLP task datasets and transformed into instruction formats with manual written templates (Wei et al., 2021). In order to align with human requirements in realistic scenarios, recent works focus on collecting instruction data from realistic scenarios (Ouyang et al., 2022; Databricks, 2023; Kopf et al., 2023; Zhang et al., 2023a; Chi- ang et al., 2023). The reinforcement learning method improves the response quality with the preference signals. InstructGPT (Ouyang et al., 2022) introduce a Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) framework, which can help LLMs learn from human preference signals. There is a line of subsequent work focused on improving the effectiveness and efficiency of this framework, e.g., RAFT (Dong et al., 2023), DPO (Rafailov et al., 2023), PRO (Song et al., 2023), COH (Liu et al., 2023) and RRHF (Yuan et al., 2023). Attributed LLM Recently, retrieval-augmented models have shown great potential. By utilizing retrieved passages to prompt models, they can enhance the correctness of the outputs, which have been applied to various downstream tasks. To further improve correctness and help users more easily verify the outputs, recent works focus on building attributed LLM, which generates text with citations. Due to the abundant knowledge obtained during the pre-training stage, there is a line of works that focus on exploring the potential of LLMs to generate citation directly (Weller et al., 2023; Xu et al., 2023; Asai et al., 2024a). To test the performance of attributed text generation, recent works build specific datasets for attribution. Specifically, CiteBench (Funkquist et al., 2022) focus on text summarization; ALCE (Gao et al., 2023b) is a comprehensive benchmark to evaluate the attribution ability of existing LLMs, which do not contain train data; HAGRID (Kamalloo et al., 2023) utilize powerful LLMs (GPT-3.5-turbo) to generate texts with citations. BioKaLMA (Li et al., 2023b) and ExpertQA (Malaviya et al., 2023) are specific-domain datasets for attribution. Besides, rather than generating citations directly, there is also a line of works (Gao et al., 2023a; Huo et al., 2023; Chen et al., 2023; Hsu et al., 2024) perform retrieving and finding supportive passages to add citations after generating outputs. Recent works utilize reward modeling (Huang et al., 2024), test-time adaptation (Ye et al., 2024), or preference learning (Li et al., 2024) to improve the performance. # 5 Conclusion In this paper, we introduce the $\mathcal{A}^3$ framework, which aims to leverage underperforming attributed LLMs to generate high-quality attributed query-response pairs for both SFT and PO stages, eliminating the requirement for human-annotated samples. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate our method's effectiveness in improving citation quality and reducing the effect of irrelevant documents. Despite the effectiveness of $\mathcal{A}^3$ , there remains a gap in fully meeting the needs of information-seeking tasks in realistic scenarios. With our framework, we hope more breakthroughs can be made to promote the development of this task. For instance, integrating it with the promising Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) methods holds great potential. # Limitations Although our instruction framework can generate high-quality attributed text generation data, it still has the following limitations: - Even though we generate data with the use of the existing corpus to ensure the faithfulness of outputs, due to the characteristic of the used backbone LLMs and the potential social bias in the corpus, it may still have the hallucination and bias problem. Therefore, the generated and data and the outputs of trained models may contain misleading and toxic information, which needs to be addressed before being applied to realistic scenario; - Although we conduct experiments on widely used attributed text generation benchmarks, the language of all these benchmarks is English, which has limited morphology. The effectiveness of our proposed method on language with varied morphology needs to be further confirmed. We have confirmed the effectiveness of our framework on multiple backbone LLMs, including LLaMA2-7B, LLaMA2-13B, LLaMA3.1-8B and LLaMA3.1-8B. However, the effectiveness on other backbone LLMs still need to be tested. - In our framework, we mainly use GPT-3.5-Turbo and GPT-4 to generate data, which can be expanded to include other closed-source or open-source LLMs, such as Claude and LLaMA3.1-Instruct. # Acknowledgments We want to thank all the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation of China (NSFC No. 62206194), the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province, China (Grant No. BK20220488), the Young Elite Scientists Sponsorship Program by CAST (2023QNRC001), and the Priority Academic Program Development of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions. # References Akari Asai, Zeqiu Wu, Yizhong Wang, Avirup Sil, and Hannaneh Hajishirzi. 2024a. Self-RAG: Learning to retrieve, generate, and critique through self-reflection. In The Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations. Akari Asai, Zexuan Zhong, Danqi Chen, Pang Wei Koh, Luke Zettlemoyer, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, and Wen-tau Yih. 2024b. Reliable, adaptable, and attributable language models with retrieval. arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.03187. Jifan Chen, Grace Kim, Aniruddh Sriram, Greg Durrett, and Eunsol Choi. 2023. Complex claim verification with evidence retrieved in the wild. arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.11859. Wei-Lin Chiang, Zhuohan Li, Zi Lin, Ying Sheng, Zhanghao Wu, Hao Zhang, Lianmin Zheng, Siyuan Zhuang, Yonghao Zhuang, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Ion Stoica, and Eric P. Xing. 2023. Vicuna: An opensource chatbot impressing gpt-4 with $90\%$ * chatgpt quality. Databricks. 2023. Databricks' dolly, a large language model trained on the databricks machine learning platform. https://github.com/databrickslabs/dolly. Hanze Dong, Wei Xiong, Deepanshu Goyal, Rui Pan, Shizhe Diao, Jipeng Zhang, Kashun Shum, and Tong Zhang. 2023. Raft: Reward ranked finetuning for generative foundation model alignment. arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.06767. Abhimanyu Dubey, Abhinav Jauhri, Abhinav Pandey, Abhishek Kadian, Ahmad Al-Dahle, Aiesha Letman, Akhil Mathur, Alan Schelten, Amy Yang, Angela Fan, et al. 2024. The llama 3 herd of models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.21783. Martin Funkquist, Ilia Kuznetsov, Yufang Hou, and Iryna Gurevych. 2022. Citebench: A benchmark for scientific citation text generation. arXiv preprint arXiv:2212.09577. Luyu Gao, Zhuyun Dai, Panupong Pasupat, Anthony Chen, Arun Tejasvi Chaganty, Yicheng Fan, Vincent Zhao, Ni Lao, Hongrae Lee, Da-Cheng Juan, et al. 2023a. Rarr: Researching and revising what language models say, using language models. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 16477-16508. Tianyu Gao, Howard Yen, Jiatong Yu, and Danqi Chen. 2023b. Enabling large language models to generate text with citations. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 6465-6488, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics. Aaron Grattafori, Abhimanyu Dubey, Abhinav Jauhri, Abhinav Pandey, Abhishek Kadian, Ahmad AlDahle, Aiesha Letman, Akhil Mathur, Alan Schelten, Alex Vaughan, Amy Yang, Angela Fan, Anirudh Goyal, Anthony Hartshorn, Aobo Yang, Archi Mitra, Archie Sravankumar, Artem Korenev, Arthur Hinsvark, Arun Rao, Aston Zhang, Aurelien Rodriguez, Austen Gregerson, Ava Spataru, Baptiste Roziere, Bethany Biron, Binh Tang, Bobbie Chern, Charlotte Caucheteux, Chaya Nayak, Chloe Bi, Chris Marra, Chris McConnell, Christian Keller, Christophe Touret, Chunyang Wu, Corinne Wong, Cristian Canton Ferrer, Cyrus Nikolaidis, Damien Allonsius, Daniel Song, Danielle Pintz, Danny Livshits, Danny Wyatt, David Esiobu, Dhruv Choudhary, Dhruv Mahajan, Diego Garcia-Olano, Diego Perino, Dieuwke Hupkes, Egor Lakomkin, Ehab AlBadawy, Elina Lobanova, Emily Dinan, Eric Michael Smith, Filip Radenovic, Francisco Guzmán, Frank Zhang Gabriel Synnaeve, Gabrielle Lee, Georgia Lewis Anderson, Govind Thattai, Graeme Nail, Gregoire Mialon, Guan Pang, Guillem Cucurell, Hailey Nguyen, Hannah Korevaar, Hu Xu, Hugo Touvron, Iliyan Zarov, Imanol Arrieta Ibarra, Isabel Kloumann, Ishan Misra, Ivan Evtimov, Jack Zhang, Jade Copet, Jaewon Lee, Jan Geffert, Jana Vranes, Jason Park, Jay Mahadeokar, Jeet Shah, Jelmer van der Linde, Jennifer Billock, Jenny Hong, Jenya Lee, Jeremy Fu, Jianfeng Chi, Jianyu Huang, Jiawen Liu, Jie Wang. Jiecao Yu, Joanna Bitton, Joe Spisak, Jongsoo Park Joseph RoccaJoshua JohnstunJoshua SaxeJunteng Jia Kalyan Vasuden Alwala Karthik Prasad Kartikeya Upasani Kate Plawiak Ke Li Kenneth Heafield,Kevin Stone,Khalid El-Arini,Krithika Iyer. Kshitiz Malik Kuenley ChiuKunal BhallaKushal Lakhotia Lauren Rantala-Yeary Laurens van der Maaten Lawrence Chen Liang Tan Liz Jenkins Louis Martin Lovish Madaan Lubo Malo Lukas Blecher Lukas Landzaat Luke de Oliveira Madeline Muzzi Mahesh Pasupuleti Mannat Singh Manohar Paluri, Marcin Kardas, Maria Tsimpoukelli, Mathew Oldham, Mathieu Rita, Maya Pavlova, Melanie Kambadur, Mike Lewis, Min Si, Mitesh Kumar Singh, Mona Hassan, Naman Goyal, Narjes Torabi, Nikolay Bashlykov, Nikolay Bogoychev, Niladri Chatterji, Ning Zhang, Olivier Duchenne, Onur Celebi, Patrick Alrassy, Pengchuan Zhang, Pengwei Li, Petar Vasic, Peter Weng, Prajwal Bhargava, Pratik Dubal, Praveen Krishnan, Punit Singh Koura, Puxin Xu, Qing He, Qingxiao Dong, Ragavan Srinivasan, Raj Ganapathy, Ramon Calderer, Ricardo Silveira Cabral, Robert Stojnic, Roberta Raileanu, Rohan Maheswari, Rohit Girdhar, Rohit Patel, Romain Sauvestre, Ronnie Polidoro, Roshan Sumbaly, Ross Taylor, Ruan Silva, Rui Hou, Rui Wang, Saghar Hosseini, Sahana Chennaibasappa, Sanjay Singh, Sean Bell, Seohyun Sonia Kim, Sergey Edunov, Shaoliang Nie, Sharan Narang, Sharath Rarparthy, Sheng Shen, Shengye Wan, Shruti Bhosale, Shun Zhang, Simon Vandenhende, Soumya Batra, Spencer Whitman, Sten Sootla, Stephane Collot, Suchin Gururangan, Sydney Borodinsky, Tamar Herman, Tara Fowler, Tarek Sheasha, Thomas Georgiou, Thomas Scialom, Tobias Speckbacher, Todor Mihaylov, Tong Xiao, Ujjwal Karn, Vedanuj Goswami, Vibhor Gupta, Vignesh Ramanathan, Viktor Kerkez, Vincent Gonguet, Virginia Do,Vish Vogeti,Vitor Albiero,Vladan Petrovic Weiwei Chu,Wenhan Xiong,Wenyin Fu.Whitney Meers,Xavier Martinet,Xiaodong Wang,Xiaofang Wang,Xiaqing Ellen Tan,Xide Xia,Xinfeng Xie,Xuchao Jia,Xuewei Wang,Yaelle Goldschlag,Yashesh Gaur,Yasmine Babaei,Yi Wen Yiwen Song,Yuchen Zhang,Yue Li,Yuning Mao Zacharie Delpierre Coudert,Zheng Yan,Zhengxing Chen,Zoe Papakipos,Aaditya Singh,Aayushi Srivastava, Abha Jain, Adam Kelsey, Adam Shajnfeld Adithya Gangidi, Adolfo Victoria,Ahuva Goldstand Ajay Menon,Ajay Sharma,Alex Boesenberg,Alexei Baevski, Allie Feinstein,Amanda Kallet,Amit Sangani Amos Teo Anam Yunus Andrei Lupu Andres Alvarado, Andrew Caples, Andrew Gu, Andrew HoAndrew PoultonAndrew RyanAnkit Ramchandani Annie DongAnnie Franco Anuj Goyal Aparajita Saraf Arkabandhu Chowdhury Ashley Gabriel Ashwin Bharambe Assaf Eisenman Azadeh YazdanBeau James,Ben Maurer Benjamin Leonhardi Bernie Huang,Beth Loyd,Beto De Paola,Bhargavi Paranjape,Bing LiuBo WuBoyu NiBraden HancockBram Wasti Brandon Spence Brani Stojkovic Brian Gamido Britt Montalvo Carl ParkerCarly BurtonCatalina Mejia Ce LiuChanghan Wang Changkyu KimChao Zhou Chester Hu ChingHsiang ChuChris CaiChris Tindal Christoph Feichtenhofer,Cynthia Gao,Damon Civin Dana Beaty Daniel KreymerDaniel LiDavid Adkins David XuDavide Testuggine Delia David Devi Parikh Diana LiskovichDidem Foss Dingkang Wang Duc Le,Dustin HollandEdward Dowling,Eissa Jamil Elaine Montgomery,Eleonora Presani Emily Hahn Emily WoodEric-Tuan LeErik Brinkman Esteban Arcaute, Evan Dunbar,Erik Smothers,Fei Sun Felix KreukFeng TianFilippos Kokkinos,Firat Ozgenel Francesco Caggioni Frank Kanayet Frank SeideGabriela Medina FlorezGabriella Schwarz Gada Badeer, Georgia Swee, Gil Halpern, Grant Herman, Grigory Sizov, Guangyi, Zhang, Guna Lakshminarayanan, Hakan Inan, Hamid Shojanazeri, Han Zou, Hannah Wang, Hanwen Zha, Haroun Habeeb, Harrison Rudolph, Helen Suk, Henry Aspegren, Hunter Goldman, Hongyuan Zhan, Ibrahim Damlaj, Igor Molybog, Igor Tufanov, Ilias Leontiadis, Irina-Elena Veliche, Itai Gat, Jake Weissman, James Geboski, James Kohli, Janice Lam, Japhet Asher, Jean-Baptiste Gaya, Jeff Marcus, Jeff Tang, Jennifer Chan, Jenny Zhen, Jeremy Reizenstein, Jeremy Teboul, Jessica Zhong, Jian Jin, Jingyi Yang, Joe Cummings, Jon Carvill, Jon Shepard, Jonathan McPhie, Jonathan Torres, Josh Ginsburg, Junjie Wang, Kai Wu, Kam Hou U, Karan Saxena, Kartikay Khandelwal, Katayoun Zand, Kathy Matosich, Kaushik Veeraraghavan, Kelly Michelena, Keqian Li, Kiran Jagadeesh, Kun Huang, Kunal Chawla, Kyle Huang, Lailin Chen, Lakshya Garg, Lavender A, Leandro Silva, Lee Bell, Lei Zhang, Liangpeng Guo, Licheng Yu, Liron Moshkovich, Luca Wehrstedt, Madian Khabsa, Manav Avalani, Manish Bhatt, Martynas Mankus, Matan Hasson, Matthew Lennie, Matthias Reso, Maxim Groshev, Maxim Naumov, Maya Lathi, Meghan Keneally, Miao Liu, Michael L. Seltzer, Michal Valko, Michelle Restrepo, Mihir Patel, Mik Vyatskov, Mikayel Samvelyan, Mike Clark, Mike Macey, Mike Wang, Miquel Jubert Hermoso, Mo Metanat, Mohammad Rastegari, Munish Bansal, Nandhini Santhanam, Natascha Parks, Natasha White, Navyata Bawa, Nayan Singhal, Nick Egebo Nicolas Usunier, Nikhil Mehta, Nikolay Pavlovich Laptev, Ning Dong, Norman Cheng, Oleg Chernoguz, Olivia Hart, Omkar Salpekar, Ozlem Kalinli, Parkin Kent, Parth Parekh, Paul Saab, Pavan Balaji Pedro Rittner Philip Bontrager Pierre Roux Piotr Dollar Polina Zvyagina Prashant Ratanchandani, British Yuvraj Qian Liang Rachad Alao Rachel RodriguezRafi Ayub,Raghotham Murthy Raghu Nayani,Rahul Mitra Rangaprabhu Parthasarathy Raymond Li Rebekkah Hogan Robin Battey Rocky Wang Russ Howes Rudy Rinott Sachin Mehta Sachin Sby,Sai Jayesh Bondu,Samyak Datta,Sara Chugh,Sara Hunt,Sargun Dhillon,Sasha Sidorov Satadru PanSaurabh MahajanSaurabh Verma Seiji Yamamoto Sharadh Ramaswamy Shaun Lindsay. Shaun Lindsay Sheng Feng Shenghao Lin Shengxin Cindy Zha Shishir Patil Shiva Shankar Shuqiang ZhangShuqiang Zhang Sinong Wang Sneha Agarwal Soji Sajuyigbe Soumith Chintala Stephanie Max Stephen Chen Steve Kehoe Steve Satterfield Sudarshan Govindaprasad Sumit Gupta Summer Deng Sungmin Cho Sunny Virk Suraj Subramanian Sy Choudhury Sydney Goldman Tal RemezTamar Glaser Tamara Best Thilo Koehler Thomas Robinson Tianhe Li Tianjun Zhang Tim Matthews Timothy Chou Tzook Shaked Varun Vontimitta Victoria Ajayi Victoria Montanez Vijai Mohan,Vinay Satish Kumar,Vishal Mangla,Vlad Ionescu,Vlad Poenaru,Vlad Tiberiu Mihailescu Vladimir Ivanov Wei Li Wenchen Wang Wenwen JiangWes Bouaziz Will Constable Xiaocheng TangXiaojian WuXiaolan Wang Xilun Wu Xinbo Gao,Yaniv Kleinman Yanjun Chen Ye HuYe Jia Ye Qi, Yenda Li, Yilin Zhang, Ying Zhang, Yossi Adi, Youngjin Nam, Yu, Wang, Yu Zhao, Yuchen Hao, Yundi Qian, Yunlu Li, Yuzi He, Zach Rait, Zachary DeVito, Zef Rosnbrick, Zhaoduo Wen, Zhenyu Yang, Zhiwei Zhao, and Zhiyu Ma. 2024. The llama 3 herd of models. Preprint, arXiv:2407.21783. I Hsu, Zifeng Wang, Long T Le, Lesly Miculicich, Nanyun Peng, Chen-Yu Lee, Tomas Pfister, et al. 2024. Calm: Contrasting large and small language models to verify grounded generation. arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.05365. Chengyu Huang, Zeqiu Wu, Yushi Hu, and Wenya Wang. 2024. Training language models to generate text with citations via fine-grained rewards. arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.04315. Siqing Huo, Negar Arabzadeh, and Charles Clarke. 2023. Retrieving supporting evidence for generative question answering. In Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval in the Asia Pacific Region, pages 11-20. Gautier Izacard, Mathilde Caron, Lucas Hosseini, Sebastian Riedel, Piotr Bojanowski, Armand Joulin, and Edouard Grave. 2022. Unsupervised dense information retrieval with contrastive learning. Transactions on Machine Learning Research. Albert Q. Jiang, Alexandre Sablayrolles, Arthur Mensch, Chris Bamford, Devendra Singh Chaplot, Diego de las Casas, Florian Bressand, Gianna Lengyel, Guillaume Lample, Lucile Saulnier, Lélio Renard Lavaud, Marie-Anne Lachaux, Pierre Stock, Teven Le Scao, Thibaut Lavril, Thomas Wang, Timothée Lacroix, and William El Sayed. 2023. Mistral 7b. Preprint, arXiv:2310.06825. Ehsan Kamalloo, Aref Jafari, Xinyu Zhang, Nandan Thakur, and Jimmy Lin. 2023. *Hagrid: A human-llm collaborative dataset for generative information-seeking with attribution.* arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.16883. Andreas Köpf, Yannic Kilcher, Dimitri von Rütte, Sotiris Anagnostidis, Zhi-Rui Tam, Keith Stevens, Abdullah Barhoum, Nguyen Minh Duc, Oliver Stanley, Richard Nagyfi, et al. 2023. Openassistant conversations-democratizing large language model alignment. arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.07327. Dongfang Li, Zetian Sun, Baotian Hu, Zhenyu Liu, Xinshuo Hu, Xuebo Liu, and Min Zhang. 2024. Improving attributed text generation of large language models via preference learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.18381. Dongfang Li, Zetian Sun, Xinshuo Hu, Zhenyu Liu, Ziyang Chen, Baotian Hu, Aiguo Wu, and Min Zhang. 2023a. A survey of large language models attribution. arXiv preprint arXiv:2311.03731. Xinze Li, Yixin Cao, Liangming Pan, Yubo Ma, and Aixin Sun. 2023b. Towards verifiable generation: A benchmark for knowledge-aware language model attribution. arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.05634. Hao Liu, Carmelo Sferrazza, and Pieter Abbeel. 2023. Languages are rewards: Hindsight finetuning using human feedback. arXiv preprint arXiv:2302.02676. Chaitanya Malaviya, Subin Lee, Sihao Chen, Elizabeth Sieber, Mark Yatskar, and Dan Roth. 2023. Expert-curated questions and attributed answers. arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.07852. Alex Mallen, Akari Asai, Victor Zhong, Rajarshi Das, Daniel Khashabi, and Hannaneh Hajishirzi. 2023. When not to trust language models: Investigating effectiveness of parametric and non-parametric memories. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 9802-9822. Sewon Min, Julian Michael, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, and Luke Zettlemoyer. 2020. Ambiguous open-domain questions. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 5783-5797, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics. Jianmo Ni, Chen Qu, Jing Lu, Zhuyun Dai, Gustavo Hernandez Abrego, Ji Ma, Vincent Zhao, Yi Luan, Keith Hall, Ming-Wei Chang, and Yinfei Yang. 2022. Large dual encoders are generalizable retrievers. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 9844–9855, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics. OpenAI. 2023a. Gpt-4 technical report. Preprint, arXiv:2303.08774. OpenAI. 2023b. Introducing chatgpt. OpenAI. 2024. Gpt-4o system card. Long Ouyang, Jeffrey Wu, Xu Jiang, Diogo Almeida, Carroll Wainwright, Pamela Mishkin, Chong Zhang, Sandhini Agarwal, Katarina Slama, Alex Ray, et al. 2022. Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 35:27730-27744. Rafael Rafailov, Archit Sharma, Eric Mitchell, Stefano Ermon, Christopher D Manning, and Chelsea Finn. 2023. Direct preference optimization: Your language model is secretly a reward model. arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.18290. Feifan Song, Bowen Yu, Minghao Li, Haiyang Yu, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li, and Houfeng Wang. 2023. Preference ranking optimization for human alignment. arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.17492. Rohan Taori, Ishaan Gulrajani, Tianyi Zhang, Yann Dubois, Xuechen Li, Carlos Guestrin, Percy Liang, and Tatsunori B. Hashimoto. 2023. Stanford alpaca: An instruction-following llama model. https://github.com/tatsu-lab/stanford_alpaca. Hugo Touvron, Louis Martin, Kevin Stone, Peter Albert, Amjad Almahairi, Yasmine Babaei, Nikolay Bashlykov, Soumya Batra, Prajjwal Bhargava, Shruti Bhosale, et al. 2023. Llama 2: Open foundation and fine-tuned chat models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.09288. Luyu Wang, Yujia Li, Ozlem Aslan, and Oriol Vinyals. 2021. Wikigraphs: A wikipedia text-knowledge graph paired dataset. *NAACL-HLT* 2021, page 67. Jason Wei, Maarten Bosma, Vincent Y Zhao, Kelvin Guu, Adams Wei Yu, Brian Lester, Nan Du, Andrew M Dai, and Quoc V Le. 2021. Finetuned language models are zero-shot learners. arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.01652. Orion Weller, Marc Marone, Nathaniel Weir, Dawn Lawrie, Daniel Khashabi, and Benjamin Van Durme. 2023. "according to..." prompting language models improves quoting from pre-training data. arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.13252. Shicheng Xu, Liang Pang, Huawei Shen, Xueqi Cheng, and Tat-seng Chua. 2023. Search-in-the-chain: Towards the accurate, credible and traceable content generation for complex knowledge-intensive tasks. arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.14732. Xi Ye, Ruoxi Sun, Sercan Arik, and Tomas Pfister. 2024. Effective large language model adaptation for improved grounding and citation generation. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 6237-6251. Zheng Yuan, Hongyi Yuan, Chuanqi Tan, Wei Wang, Songfang Huang, and Fei Huang. 2023. Rrhf: Rank responses to align language models with human feedback without tears. arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.05302. Ge Zhang, Yemin Shi, Ruibo Liu, Ruibin Yuan, Yizhi Li, Siwei Dong, Yu Shu, Zhaoqun Li, Zekun Wang, Chenghua Lin, et al. 2023a. Chinese open instruction generalist: A preliminary release. arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.07987. Xinyu Zhang, Nandan Thakur, Odunayo Ogundepo, Ehsan Kamalloo, David Alfonso-Hermelo, Xiaoguang Li, Qun Liu, Mehdi Rezagholizadeh, and Jimmy Lin. 2022. Making a miracl: Multilingual information retrieval across a continuum of languages. Preprint, arXiv:2210.09984. Yue Zhang, Yafu Li, Leyang Cui, Deng Cai, Lemao Liu, Tingchen Fu, Xinting Huang, Enbo Zhao, Yu Zhang, Yulong Chen, et al. 2023b. Siren's song in the ai ocean: A survey on hallucination in large language models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.01219. Andrew Zhu, Alyssa Hwang, Liam Dugan, and Chris Callison-Burch. 2024. Fanoutqa: A multi-hop, multi-document question answering benchmark for large language models. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 18-37. # A Model Training # A.1 Supervised Fine-tuning Stage We recognize each sample as follows: Instruction: Write a high-quality answer for the given question using only the provided search results and cite them properly using [1][2][3]. Question: $\{Q_i\}$ Document[j]:{pj} Output: $\{R_iC_i\}$ We only compute cross-entropy loss on output to train the SFT model $M_{SFT}$ . # A.2 Preference Optimization Stage In the PO stage, we use Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) (Rafailov et al., 2023) loss function. We use the prompt template the same as the one used in the SFT stage. Formally, we use $\mathcal{L}_{DPO}$ to train the DPO model $M_{DPO}$ : $$ \mathcal {L} _ {D P O} = - \mathbb {E} \left[ \log \sigma \left(\alpha \frac {M _ {D P O} \left(R _ {i} C _ {i} \mid Q _ {i} P _ {i}\right)}{M _ {S F T} \left(R _ {i} C _ {i} \mid Q _ {i} P _ {i}\right)} - \alpha \frac {M _ {D P O} \left(D R _ {i} D C _ {i} \mid Q _ {i} P _ {i}\right)}{M _ {S F T} \left(D R _ {i} D C _ {i} \mid I\right)}\right) \right] $$ where $\sigma$ represents the logistic function, $\alpha$ is a hyper-parameter. # B Implementation Details # B.1 Training Details We implement all models with the open-source toolkit Transformers $^{10}$ . In the SFT stage, we follow Alpaca (Taori et al., 2023) use AdamW optimizer and set the learning rate to 1e-5, batch size to 32, learning rate warmup ratio to 0.03, input length to 2,048 and perform training for 3 epochs. We update all parameters during the fine-tuning stage. Our DPO implementation is based on the Alignment-Handbook $^{11}$ . In the DPO stage, we set the learning rate to 5e-7, batch size to 16, learning rate warmup ratio to 0.1, input length to 2,048, and perform training for 1 epoch. All the fine-tuning experiments are performed with 80GB NVIDIA A100 GPUs. # B.2 Inference Details During the model inference state, we use the prompt template the same as the one used in the SFT stage. We use the same retriever and documents with Top-5 scores for our method and all the baselines. Specifically, following ALCE (Gao et al., 2023b) and Self-RAG (Asai et al., 2024a), we use GTR (Ni et al., 2022) for ASQA, BM25 for ELI5 and Contriever-MS MARCO (Izacard et al., 2022) for PopQA. We set the temperature to 1 and the Top-P value to 0.95, then sample one response for each query. # C Prompt Template In Q&A Pair Extraction, we generate $R_{i}$ based on $P_{i}$ using the following prompt template: I will give a reference paragraph. Please summarize this paragraph briefly. Reference: $\{P_{\nu}\}$ Summary: We generate $Q_{i}$ based on $R_{i}$ using the following prompt template: I will give an answer. Please design a question for this answer. Answer: $\{R_i\}$ Question: We generate multiple attributed Q&A pairs based on $P_{i}$ with the use of following prompt template: I will give some reference paragraphs. Please design some question-answer pairs based on these paragraphs. Each question starts with $Q$ : and each answer starts with $A$ . You should consider the interconnectedness of content across multiple paragraphs and formulate questions that draw connections between the information presented in those paragraphs. Also, mention the reference of parts of your answer based on the given paragraphs within brackets [] as in the IEEE format. Reference: $\{P_i\}$ # D The Performance on Different Backbone Models In Table 5, we show the performance of our framework on different backbone models. The significant
MethodASQAELI5PopQA Correct Acc.
Correct EM Rec.Citation Rec.Prec.Correct ClaimCitation Rec.Prec.
LLaMA2-7B (Touvron et al., 2023)12.41.32.72.40.80.945.9
LLaMA2-7B-Hagrid (Kamalloo et al., 2023)28.548.854.29.718.830.240.7
LLaMA2-7B-\(A^3\)-SFT (Ours)31.373.671.49.433.633.949.5
LLaMA2-7B-\(A^3\)-PO (Ours)33.280.776.18.644.746.352.1
LLaMA2-13B (Touvron et al., 2023)26.910.615.43.93.15.321.9
LLaMA2-13B-Vicuna (Chiang et al., 2023)31.951.150.110.015.619.6-
LLaMA2-13B-Chat (Touvron et al., 2023)35.238.439.413.417.315.8-
LLaMA2-13B-Hagrid (Kamalloo et al., 2023)28.746.547.07.914.817.427.6
LLaMA2-13B-Self-RAG (Asai et al., 2024a)31.770.371.310.720.822.5-
LLaMA2-13B-\(A^3\)-SFT (Ours)31.579.979.69.141.641.345.7
LLaMA2-13B-\(A^3\)-PO (Ours)31.782.382.58.942.042.347.1
Mistral-7B (Jiang et al., 2023)13.30.71.73.81.42.742.3
Mistral-7B-Hagrid (Kamalloo et al., 2023)15.236.140.15.420.228.243.7
Mistral-7B-\(A^3\)-SFT (Ours)31.476.875.68.637.636.947.2
Mistral-7B-\(A^3\)-PO (Ours)31.784.487.06.060.768.952.8
LLaMA2-70B-Chat (Touvron et al., 2023)41.562.961.312.838.337.9-
GPT-3.5-Turbo (OpenAI, 2023b)40.473.672.512.051.150.0-
GPT-4 (OpenAI, 2023a)41.373.076.514.248.553.4-
GPT-3.5-Turbo-CaLM (Hsu et al., 2024)45.078.072.612.951.946.6-
Table 5: The performance of all the baseline and our proposed framework on ASQA, ELI5, and PopQA. Bold indicates the best performance. EM, Rec., Prec. and Acc. denote Exact Match, Recall, Precision, and Accuracy.
Document SelectionWhether QGDG ModelCorrect EM Rec.Citation Rec.Prec.
Query Based×gpt-3.5-turbo-030128.746.547.0
Query Based×gpt-4-1106-preview29.962.655.2
Query Based✓gpt-4-1106-preview30.873.051.9
Entity Based✓gpt-4-1106-preview31.373.272.7
Table 6: The effect of different document selection and data generation strategies. Bold indicates the best performance. Whether QG represents whether we generate questions based on the selected documents. DG Model denotes the LLM we used to generate data. improvements across different backbone models shows the generalizability of our framework. # E The Effect of Document Selection Strategy In our preliminary experiments, we find that selecting multiple documents randomly as $P_{i}$ to generate $(Q_{i}, R_{i}, C_{i})$ causes the generated response to usually have only one citation. We speculate this phenomenon results from the selected documents that are not interrelated. Therefore, in this experiment, we study the effect of different document selection strategies. We compare the entity matching based document clustering strategy with the query based document clustering strategy. Specifically, we utilize a retriever to get multiple passages related to one query and treat these retrieved passages as selected passages. We collect these queries and retrieved passages from MIRACL (Zhang et al., 2022). For the query based document clustering strategy, since we have achieved queries, we also compare the performance whether using this query as $Q_{i}$ or generating $Q_{i}$ as the entity matching based document clustering strategy. The results in Table 6 confirm the effectiveness of our proposed entity matching based document clustering strategy. Besides, we can find that the data generation model has a significant effect on the performance. # F Irrelevant Citation Analysis We also find that significant contribution of these two strategies to avoiding unnecessary, irrelevant citations. As shown in Figure 5, the noisy document augmentation and data filtering can reduce ![](images/4ee53f7f977b07de37af8503d63c04ef4bcdacb2dc80f84169cc60b658368d08.jpg) Figure 5: The irrelevant citation percentage when using Data Filtering and Noisy Document Augmentation strategies. We report the performance on ASQA when using LLaMA2-7B as backbone models. the percentage of irrelevant citations.