Shunyuan Zhou

RAG-Stress introduces a controlled diagnostic protocol that holds the question and reference answer fixed, edits one assertion so the evidence supports a designated incorrect answer, and crosses two source-priority policies with three positions of the answer span in the evidence text, measuring a misleading rate on questions each model answered correctly without retrieval across fifteen systems, three QA datasets, and English and Chinese medical QA. Instructions that prioritize documents consistently produce higher misleading rates than those permitting prior knowledge, with a mean gap of 10.9–13.5 percentage points across the three QA datasets, and model-averaged rates follow End, Beginning, Middle under both policies.

RAG-Stress introduces a controlled diagnostic protocol that holds the question and reference answer fixed, edits one assertion so the evidence supports a designated incorrect answer, and crosses two source-priority policies with three positions of the answer span in the evidence text, measuring a misleading rate on questions each model answered correctly without retrieval across fifteen systems, three QA datasets, and English and Chinese medical QA. Instructions that prioritize documents consistently produce higher misleading rates than those permitting prior knowledge, with a mean gap of 10.9–13.5 percentage points across the three QA datasets, and model-averaged rates follow End, Beginning, Middle under both policies.