# C2-Cite: Contextual-Aware Citation Generation for Attributed Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.00004 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00004/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Self-RAG: Learning to Retrieve, Generate, and Critique through Self-Reflection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11511/) (2023)
- [Enabling Large Language Models to Generate Text with Citations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14627/) (2023)
- [ELI5: Long Form Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.09190/) (2019)
- [A Survey on RAG Meeting LLMs: Towards Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06211/) (2024)
- [Unnatural Instructions: Tuning Language Models with (Almost) No Human Labor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09689/) (2022)
- [LongCite: Enabling LLMs to Generate Fine-grained Citations in Long-context QA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02897/) (2024)
- [PathRAG: Pruning Graph-based Retrieval Augmented Generation with Relational Paths](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14902/) (2025)
- [Attribute First, then Generate: Locally-attributable Grounded Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17104/) (2024)
- [Effective Large Language Model Adaptation for Improved Grounding and Citation Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09533/) (2023)
- [QAMPARI: An Open-domain Question Answering Benchmark for Questions with Many Answers from Multiple Paragraphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12665/) (2022)
- [Training Language Models to Generate Text with Citations via Fine-grained Rewards](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04315/) (2024)
- [Making Long-Context Language Models Better Multi-Hop Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03246/) (2024)
- [Emotional RAG: Enhancing Role-Playing Agents through Emotional Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23041/) (2024)
- [Citation-Enhanced Generation for LLM-based Chatbots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16063/) (2024)
- [Peering into the Mind of Language Models: An Approach for Attribution in Contextual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17980/) (2024)
- [Towards Verifiable Text Generation with Evolving Memory and Self-Reflection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09075/) (2023)
- [LongFaith: Enhancing Long-Context Reasoning in LLMs with Faithful Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12583/) (2025)
- [Advancing Large Language Model Attribution through Self-Improving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13298/) (2024)
- [Towards Reliable and Fluent Large Language Models: Incorporating Feedback Learning Loops in QA Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06384/) (2023)
- [Lessons from Training Grounded LLMs with Verifiable Rewards](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15522/) (2025)
- [Attention with Dependency Parsing Augmentation for Fine-Grained Attribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11404/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The attribution technique enhances the credibility of LLMs by adding citations to the generated sentences, enabling users to trace back to the original sources and verify the reliability of the output. However, existing instruction-tuned attributed LLMs often fail to properly interpret the contextual semantics of citation symbols (e.g., [i]) during text generation. This shortcoming arises from their insufficient awareness of the context information surrounding citation markers, which in turn leads to disjointed references and poor integration of retrieved knowledge into the generated content. To address this issue, we propose a novel Contextual-aware Citation generation framework (C2-Cite) that explicitly integrates the semantic relationships between citation markers and their referenced content. Specifically, a contextual citation alignment mechanism is adopted: it first encodes the retrieved document contexts into the symbol representation of citations, then aligns the marker numbers by decoding information from a citation router function. This mechanism enables the transformation of citation markers from generic placeholders into active knowledge pointers that link to the referenced source information. Experimental results on the ALCE benchmark across three datasets validate our framework C2-Cite++: it outperforms the SOTA baseline by an average of 5.8% in citation quality and 17.4% in response correctness. The implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/BAI-LAB/c2cite