Author: Manas Gaur, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

ChatGPT and other AI chatbots based on large language models are known to occasionally make things up, including scientific and legal citations. It turns out that measuring how accurate an AI model’s citations are is a good way of assessing the model’s reasoning abilities. An AI model “reasons” by breaking down a query into steps and working through them in order. Think of how you learned to solve math word problems in school. Ideally, to generate citations an AI model would understand the key concepts in a document, generate a ranked list of relevant papers to cite, and provide convincing…