@inproceedings{yang-etal-2026-lifecycle,
title = "Lifecycle Faithfulness for Grounded Retrieval-Augmented Generation: Benchmarks, Evaluation, and the Vera-Life Controller",
author = "Yang, Zida and
You, Guquan and
Zheng, Jiexin and
Peng, Yijie",
editor = "Wang, Yimu and
Choi, Yee Man and
Wu, Di and
Ouyang, Siqi and
Azadani, Mozhgan Nasr and
Fung, Yi R. (May)",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Grounding Language Models: Learning Faithfully and Efficiently ({G}round{LM} 2026)",
month = oct,
year = "2026",
address = "Budapest, Hungary",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.groundlm-1.18/",
pages = "211--240",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-478-1",
abstract = "Retrieval-augmented generation treats citation as a default proxy for reliability, yet a cited passage can support a claim and still be obsolete, superseded, contradicted, or invalid at the user{'}s target time. We name this failure a citation-supported lifecycle error and define lifecycle faithfulness: a claim-level criterion that requires semantic support, target-time validity, non-supersession, and provenance. We release Vera-Life-Eval, an 8,500-question benchmark with 41,203 versioned evidence pieces across six lifecycle settings (current, past, stale-only, update, conflict, and multi-hop), and Vera-Life, a low-training modular controller that builds an evidence-state graph, selects claim-evidence-time contracts, and chooses among answer, warn{\_}stale, explain{\_}conflict, retrieve{\_}more, and abstain, emitting a claim-level lifecycle ledger. On a shared Qwen3-8B generator, Vera-Life raises LifeEM from .374 (best prompt-only baseline) to .623, and remains effective under timestamp-only (.584) and text-only (.504) regimes. Same-action controls, metadata isolation, and source-disjoint transfer across product, policy, scientific, and news evidence show that the gains are not an artefact of output format or Wikipedia revision cues. The next mission for RAG is not merely to cite evidence, but to know whether that evidence is still alive."
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<abstract>Retrieval-augmented generation treats citation as a default proxy for reliability, yet a cited passage can support a claim and still be obsolete, superseded, contradicted, or invalid at the user’s target time. We name this failure a citation-supported lifecycle error and define lifecycle faithfulness: a claim-level criterion that requires semantic support, target-time validity, non-supersession, and provenance. We release Vera-Life-Eval, an 8,500-question benchmark with 41,203 versioned evidence pieces across six lifecycle settings (current, past, stale-only, update, conflict, and multi-hop), and Vera-Life, a low-training modular controller that builds an evidence-state graph, selects claim-evidence-time contracts, and chooses among answer, warn_stale, explain_conflict, retrieve_more, and abstain, emitting a claim-level lifecycle ledger. On a shared Qwen3-8B generator, Vera-Life raises LifeEM from .374 (best prompt-only baseline) to .623, and remains effective under timestamp-only (.584) and text-only (.504) regimes. Same-action controls, metadata isolation, and source-disjoint transfer across product, policy, scientific, and news evidence show that the gains are not an artefact of output format or Wikipedia revision cues. The next mission for RAG is not merely to cite evidence, but to know whether that evidence is still alive.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Lifecycle Faithfulness for Grounded Retrieval-Augmented Generation: Benchmarks, Evaluation, and the Vera-Life Controller
%A Yang, Zida
%A You, Guquan
%A Zheng, Jiexin
%A Peng, Yijie
%Y Wang, Yimu
%Y Choi, Yee Man
%Y Wu, Di
%Y Ouyang, Siqi
%Y Azadani, Mozhgan Nasr
%Y Fung, Yi R. (May)
%S Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Grounding Language Models: Learning Faithfully and Efficiently (GroundLM 2026)
%D 2026
%8 October
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Budapest, Hungary
%@ 979-8-89176-478-1
%F yang-etal-2026-lifecycle
%X Retrieval-augmented generation treats citation as a default proxy for reliability, yet a cited passage can support a claim and still be obsolete, superseded, contradicted, or invalid at the user’s target time. We name this failure a citation-supported lifecycle error and define lifecycle faithfulness: a claim-level criterion that requires semantic support, target-time validity, non-supersession, and provenance. We release Vera-Life-Eval, an 8,500-question benchmark with 41,203 versioned evidence pieces across six lifecycle settings (current, past, stale-only, update, conflict, and multi-hop), and Vera-Life, a low-training modular controller that builds an evidence-state graph, selects claim-evidence-time contracts, and chooses among answer, warn_stale, explain_conflict, retrieve_more, and abstain, emitting a claim-level lifecycle ledger. On a shared Qwen3-8B generator, Vera-Life raises LifeEM from .374 (best prompt-only baseline) to .623, and remains effective under timestamp-only (.584) and text-only (.504) regimes. Same-action controls, metadata isolation, and source-disjoint transfer across product, policy, scientific, and news evidence show that the gains are not an artefact of output format or Wikipedia revision cues. The next mission for RAG is not merely to cite evidence, but to know whether that evidence is still alive.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.groundlm-1.18/
%P 211-240
Markdown (Informal)
[Lifecycle Faithfulness for Grounded Retrieval-Augmented Generation: Benchmarks, Evaluation, and the Vera-Life Controller](https://aclanthology.org/2026.groundlm-1.18/) (Yang et al., GroundLM 2026)
ACL