arXiv Machine Learning
Sieve and Sage: Efficient Distraction Filtering for Reliable RALM Abstention
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arXiv AI
Sep 1
MUDDLE: Measuring Understanding of Documents under Distractor and Length Effects
MUDDLE is a benchmark designed to disentangle the effects of document length and topical distractors on document question‑answering systems. It contains 270 human‑annotated questions, each tested in five conditions: the source alone, the source with two or four hard negatives (topically similar), and the source with two or four random distractors matched in length and provenance. Experiments with GPT‑5‑mini show that hard negatives reduce accuracy more than length‑matched random distractors, indicating that topical similarity is a more significant source of error than length alone.
arXiv AI
Jun 16
When RAG Hurts: Diagnosing and Mitigating Attention Distraction in Retrieval-Augmented LVLMs
arXiv:2602. 00344v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is one of the dominant paradigms for enhancing Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) on knowledge-based VQA tasks, recent work attributes RAG failures to insufficient attention towards the retrieved context, proposing to reduce the attention allocated to image tokens.
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1
UTILMEM: Benchmarking Evidence Utilization in Long-Term Conversational Memory
UTILMEM is a new diagnostic benchmark that tests how conversational agents use long‑term memory, focusing on reasoning over dense histories, spotting implicitly relevant memories, synthesizing distributed evidence, and resisting interference from similar distractors. It contains 1,717 instances across five domains and evaluates a range of retrieval‑based and memory‑augmented systems. The study shows that strong performance on traditional factual recall does not guarantee effective memory utilization, highlighting a gap between retrieving information and integrating it into coherent, task‑oriented outputs.
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22
Context Poisoning as Extreme-Value Attention Interference in Long-Context Language Models
arXiv:2609.22101v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models can process increasingly long prompts, yet their ability to locate and use decisive evidence may degrade as irrelevant or confu...
arXiv AI
Aug 21
The First Drop of Ink: Nonlinear Impact of Distracting Information in Long-Context Reasoning
arXiv:2605. 10828v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As large language models are increasingly deployed in retrieval-augmented generation and agentic systems that accumulate extensive context, understanding how distracting information affects long-context performance becomes critical.
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 2
TRIS: A Tri-Layer Retrieval Integrity Sieve Against Knowledge Poisoning
arXiv:2609.00470v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) grounds large language models in external corpora, but implicit trust in retrieved documents creates a critical at...