Does RAG Know When Retrieval Is Wrong? Diagnosing Context Compliance under Knowledge Conflict
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is usually evaluated by whether the final answer is correct. Under knowledge conflict, this hides a key question: did the model follow retrieved evidence, rely on its parametric prior, or produce a post-hoc rationale? We study this as context compliance, the regime in which retrieved context controls the answer even when it conflicts with the model's prior knowledge. We introduce Context-Driven Decomposition (CDD), an inference-time diagnostic intervention that elicits contextual and prior answers, isolates the conflicting premise, and records a resolution trace that can be perturbed. Across Epi-Scale stress tests, TruthfulQA misconception injection, a...
| Authors | Yihang Chen, Pin Qian, Su Wang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 14 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 19 July 2026 |
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