Are Finer Citations Always Better? Rethinking Granularity for Attributed Generation

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 best-performing granularity, and up to 338% on individual tasks. Strikingly, setting citation granularity to its optimal value (based on attribution quality) unlocks these substantial gains while leaving overall answer correctness essentially unchanged (between -2.3% and +4.4%). We observe a consistent pattern where attribution quality peaks at intermediate (paragraph-level) granularities: finer citations appear to sever the semantic dependencies needed to ground a claim, while excessively coarse citations introduce distracting noise. Importantly, this performance gap varies with scale: when a claim rests on a small or moderate amount of evidence, it disproportionately penalizes larger models by disrupting the multi-sentence information synthesis at which they excel. Fine-grained citation rests on the premise that a sentence is a sufficient unit of evidence on its own. Our results indicate that it often is not, and that this is a property of the model rather than of the citation standard. Standards fixed for human verifiability may therefore paradoxically degrade the very attribution they aim to ensure; effective attribution requires matching granularity to the model's semantic scope rather than fixing it by convention.