arXiv AI By Robin Linzmayer, No\'emie Elhadad

Untangling the Mechanisms of Misleading Context in Medical Question Answering

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The paper investigates how misleading context—specifically fabricated evidence and bare assertions—affects large language models’ medical question‑answering performance. Experiments on MedMisBench show that models are more prone to adopt answers based on assertions than fabricated evidence, and that these misleading cues are often disclosed in reasoning traces but rarely in final responses. A monitor that reads open reasoning traces can detect most corrupted decisions, whereas monitoring only responses is less effective.

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