What Do Rationales Communicate? A Message-Intervention Study in Role-Specialized QA
Role-specialized QA pipelines increasingly pass rationales from a reasoner to a verifier, but it is unclear what this message actually buys: better answers, stronger support assessment, or a new failure surface. We introduce a message-intervention diagnostic that fixes the evidence and candidate answer while varying only the rationale passed across the reasoner-to-verifier boundary. On 400 MuSiQue, HotpotQA, and 2WikiMultiHopQA examples with DeepSeek as generator and verifier, faithful rationales add almost no answer accuracy over no rationale, while corrupted rationales strongly alter support judgments. Under a blind verifier prompt, harmless paraphrases shift support by only 0--2.5%, wh...
| Authors | Jiameng Zhang, Hongqiu Wu |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 27 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 27 July 2026 |
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