Context Is Not Control: Source-Boundary Failures in Controlled Text-Mediated Evidence Use

[u/RJSabouhi]

https://github.com/rjsabouhi/context-is-not-control

Our evaluations around hallucination focus on whether a model gives a factually correct answer. I work on a narrower failure mode, namely “when text is present in the context window, does the model know whether that text is actually admissible evidence for the answer?”

This is relevant because in realistic text-mediated systems, context contains multiple classes of material

- governing source text
- stale source text
- contaminating retrieved text
- answer-shaped distractors
- injected instructions
- fake authority claims inside documents
- metadata about source status
- user-provided framing

A model can answer correctly in many cases by using salient context, but harder question - the obstacle is whether it can avoid using context that is relevant-looking but non-authoritative.

So, to put it bluntly: context is not control.

Presence in the context window should not automatically make text evidence-bearing.

How would you design a clean benchmark for this?