ReCite: Agentic Reasoning for Faithful Citation

Yuyang Huang, Bobo Li, JiaJia Song, Yuzhe Ding, Chong Teng, Fei Li, Donghong Ji


Abstract
Accurate citations are the foundation of academic writing, tracing intellectual origins and substantiating core claims. However, manually navigating the growing volume of scientific literature is increasingly difficult, prompting reliance on automatic citation recommendation. While modern retrieval-augmented architectures have largely mitigated the fabrication of non-existent papers, current systems relying on semantic similarity struggle with misattribution, often citing authentic papers that fail to logically support the author’s claim. To address this challenge, we argue that accurate citation requires a shift from similarity-based search to active, claim-level reasoning. We propose ReCite, a decoupled agentic framework that orchestrates location perception, intent-aware query planning, and reflective verification. Trained on synthesized reasoning trajectories, our agent verifies claim-evidence consistency and triggers self-correction loops when retrieved candidates lack logical support. Experiments demonstrate that our lightweight framework outperforms state-of-the-art massive generative models in strict citation accuracy. By grounding literature matching in verifiable logic rather than semantic overlap, ReCite establishes a reliable foundation for automated academic writing.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-emnlp.1477
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
31441–31454
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1477/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yuyang Huang, Bobo Li, JiaJia Song, Yuzhe Ding, Chong Teng, Fei Li, and Donghong Ji. 2026. ReCite: Agentic Reasoning for Faithful Citation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 31441–31454, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ReCite: Agentic Reasoning for Faithful Citation (Huang et al., Findings 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1477.pdf