Irrelevant Context Alters Model Answers

sanmikoyejo · x · 2026-07-16

This study tests how models perform when task-irrelevant context is prepended to questions across multiple QA benchmarks.

Key findings:

• Even semantically meaningless pseudo-words can cause models to significantly change their answers on certain samples
• This effect leads to both "worse" and "better" outcomes for different samples
• The upper and lower tail samples (those with the most significant changes) account for the majority of the overall variance

This highlights the models' sensitivity to contextual noise, suggesting that we must look at distribution tails rather than just average scores.

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