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Detecting and Correcting Reference Hallucinations in Commercial LLMs and Deep Research Agents

L5 · ResearcherResearcharXiv· 4/3/2026

Critical safety and reliability research for production LLM deployments, especially research agents and citation-dependent applications.

AI Summary

A systematic empirical study measuring citation rates across 10 LLMs and deep research agents, finding that 3-13% of provided URLs are completely fabricated and 5-18% are broken or invalid. The research introduces DRBench and ExpertQA benchmarks to evaluate citation reliability across 53,000+ URLs and 32 academic fields.

Excerpt

Large language models and deep research agents supply citation URLs to support their claims, yet the reliability of these citations has not been systematically measured. We address six research questions about citation URL validity using 10 models and agents on DRBench (53,090 URLs) and 3 models on ExpertQA (168,021 URLs across 32 academic fields). We find that 3--13\% of citation URLs are hallucinated -- they have no record in the Wayback Machine and likely never existed -- while 5--18\% are no

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