CiteTutor: a local tutor that verifies before it answers

Description and use

CiteTutor is a local tutor that verifies answers before displaying them, using multiple LLMs for drafting and source verification, and provides page‑level citations.

Problem

Students need reliable, source‑anchored explanations from local course materials without exposing content to external services.

Outcome

CiteTutor achieved 7/7 supported answers with correct citations after revisions, eliminated false refusals, and maintained a median latency of 44.5 s on an 8 GB Apple M1.

Workflow

• Upload PDF notes
• Ask a question or request a quiz
• Retrieve relevant chunks via BM25 + cosine similarity
• Gemma drafts answer with chunk IDs
• Blind Qwen verifies source support
• If verified, display answer with citations; else retry or refuse
• Generate practice questions with separate verification
• Human reviews OCR‑transcribed scans before ingestion

Evidence

Gemma spent 24.84 seconds drafting an answer, and two Qwen checks took another 20.48 seconds.

Source

After the one‑time dependency installation and model pulls: ./run.sh Open http://127.0.0.1:8000

Source

On an 8 GB Apple M1, I ran ten questions against an original three‑page mechanics PDF. The preserved reports show: Supported answers correct 7/7, False refusals on supported questions 0/7, Unrelated questions refused 3/3. Returned tutor latency was 44.5 seconds median.

Source