Detecting Is Not Resolving: The Monitoring Control Gap in Retrieval Augmented LLMs

Retrieval-augmented LLMs are deployed for tasks where evidence quality determines action safety, yet evaluation protocols assume that single-turn robustness predicts robustness when evidence accumulates across turns. We show this assumption is fundamentally incorrect. Models exhibit a monitoring-control gap: they readily acknowledge contradictory evidence, yet this awareness fails to constrain their final recommendations - detecting epistemic conflict does not imply resolving it safely. Through a multi-turn document accumulation protocol across four model families (1.5B-32B parameters) and over 50,000 turn-level evaluations, we demonstrate that single-turn diagnostics systematically overe...

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