The Temporal Tug-of-War: Visualizing and Detecting RAG Conflicts in Diffusion Models via Trajectory Variance
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) introduces a specific failure mode in discrete diffusion language models: when retrieved context contradicts parametric knowledge, the iterative denoising process becomes a visible battleground between competing knowledge sources. We identify temporal semantic divergence as an observable for detecting these conflicts and introduce the Trajectory Variance Score (TVS), a simple and interpretable measure of this divergence. TVS computes the mean pairwise cosine distance of answer embeddings across independent stochastic denoising trajectories, capturing the temporal tug of war between parametric and contextual attractors. Requiring as few as two parallel ...
| Authors | Sravan Karthick T, Pranav Darshan, Pranav A et al. |
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| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 16 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 16 September 2026 |
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