Deterministic Citation Validation for Grounded Language-Model Systems

Retrieval-augmented generation reduces but does not eliminate unsupported assertions in language-model systems, because in the common implementation the model authors both the answer and its source reference. This paper draws a distinction between a model-authored citation (a generated claim about provenance) and a record-carried citation (a data field attached to a retrieved record independently of any generated text). We define a citation soundness property over displayed outputs, show that it is enforceable by a deterministic validation gate operating after inference and before display, and argue that the gate must fail closed rather than degrade.

The formal content is definitional rather than deep; the contribution is architectural, and its value is that it converts a per-instance verification question into an operation a third party can perform without access to the system. We describe an implementation in a production consumer decision system, report the citation-resolvability profile of its curated corpus, and set out the two prerequisites on which the guarantee depends.