Pith. sign in

REVIEW 10 cited by

How Easily do Irrelevant Inputs Skew the Responses of Large Language Models?

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 2404.03302 v4 pith:KPH5J7H5 submitted 2024-04-04 cs.CL

How Easily do Irrelevant Inputs Skew the Responses of Large Language Models?

classification cs.CL
keywords informationirrelevantllmscurrenthighlyrelatedeasilygithub
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
0 comments
read the original abstract

By leveraging the retrieval of information from external knowledge databases, Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit enhanced capabilities for accomplishing many knowledge-intensive tasks. However, due to the inherent flaws of current retrieval systems, there might exist irrelevant information within those retrieving top-ranked passages. In this work, we present a comprehensive investigation into the robustness of LLMs to different types of irrelevant information under various conditions. We initially introduce a framework to construct high-quality irrelevant information that ranges from semantically unrelated, partially related, and related to questions. Furthermore, our analysis demonstrates that the constructed irrelevant information not only scores highly on similarity metrics, being highly retrieved by existing systems, but also bears semantic connections to the context. Our investigation reveals that current LLMs still face challenges in discriminating highly semantically related information and can be easily distracted by these irrelevant yet misleading content. Besides, we also find that current solutions for handling irrelevant information have limitations in improving the robustness of LLMs to such distractions. All the resources are available on GitHub at https://github.com/Di-viner/LLM-Robustness-to-Irrelevant-Information.

discussion (0)

Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.

Forward citations

Cited by 10 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. APIVOT: Adaptive Planning with Interleaved Vision-Language Thoughts

    cs.CV 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    A VLM planner that adaptively inserts latent visual thoughts of future states into its reasoning trace beats language-only and prior VLM planners on long-horizon kitchen tasks, especially under tight free space.

  2. Do LLM Attribution Metrics Transfer? Auditing Retrieval-Augmented Generation Evaluation Across Datasets and Constructs

    cs.CL 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    No automatic attribution scorer transfers across datasets in generated-answer attribution evaluation; per-dataset rankings invert and some drop to chance level, requiring target-dataset validation.

  3. CQC-RAG: Robust Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Cross-Query Consistency

    cs.IR 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    CQC-RAG improves RAG factuality by generating diverse equivalent queries, building query-specific contexts, and selecting answers via cross-query confidence stability, with reported gains of +4.76 pp EM on TriviaQA an...

  4. CLORE: Content-Level Optimization for Reasoning Efficiency

    cs.AI 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    CLORE augments correct on-policy rollouts by deleting repetitive and irrelevant segments then optimizes with auxiliary DPO to improve accuracy-efficiency trade-off on math benchmarks.

  5. Seir\^enes: Adversarial Self-Play with Evolving Distractions for LLM Reasoning

    cs.AI 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Seirênes trains LLMs via adversarial self-play to generate and overcome evolving distractions, producing gains of 7-10 points on math reasoning benchmarks and exposing blind spots in larger models.

  6. Progressive Multimodal Search and Reasoning for Knowledge-Intensive Visual Question Answering

    cs.CV 2025-08 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    PMSR progressively constructs structured reasoning trajectories with dual-scope queries and compositional reasoning to improve knowledge acquisition and answer accuracy in knowledge-intensive VQA.

  7. Exploring a Gamified Personality Assessment Method through Interaction with LLM Agents Embodying Different Personalities

    cs.HC 2025-07 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    A gamified system with multiple LLM agents of varied personalities gathers interaction data to produce more effective and interpretable Big Five personality assessments than single-context methods.

  8. E2LLM: Encoder Elongated Large Language Models for Long-Context Understanding and Reasoning

    cs.CL 2024-09 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    E2LLM uses encoder-based soft prompt compression for long contexts to improve LLM reasoning on tasks like summarization and QA while maintaining efficiency.

  9. Robust Audio-Text Retrieval via Cross-Modal Attention and Hybrid Loss

    cs.CL 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    A cross-modal attention refinement module plus hybrid loss improves robustness of audio-text retrieval on noisy and long-form audio.

  10. From Cool Demos to Production-Ready FMware: Core Challenges and a Technology Roadmap

    cs.SE 2024-10 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    A semi-structured thematic synthesis identifies core challenges in FM selection, alignment, prompting, orchestration, testing, deployment, and cross-cutting concerns like observability for production-ready FMware.