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Learning When to Trust via Selective Context Preference Optimization

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Merged summary

TL;DR - An arXiv paper reframing context robustness as "selective trust": models should reject misleading external context without becoming blind to helpful context, and it introduces a benchmark, a metric, and a DPO-based training method to get there.

  • MIST benchmark: human-annotated, rendering each reasoning item under four matched conditions — clean, misleading, correct-context, and irrelevant-context — so trust and resistance can be measured separately.
  • SC2W metric: a paired measure counting how often an injected misleading signal flips a clean-correct answer to wrong; a benchmark study finds this susceptibility is universal across models.
  • SCOPE method: mines clean-correct/misleading-wrong failure pairs and applies a standard DPO objective over matched preference pairs balanced equally across all four conditions, rather than training only on misleading items.
  • Reported effect: substantially lower SC2W on popular open-source models while preserving accuracy when added context is clean, correct, or irrelevant — the paper's core argument being that resistance alone is the wrong evaluation target.

Sources (1)

Learning When to Trust via Selective Context Preference Optimization

arXiv cs.CL Xian Sun, Wei Chow, Yingshuo Wang, Junhao Liu, Wei Gao, Qing Wu, Lingdong Kong 2026-08-06 arXiv:2608.06377
Public signals Semantic Scholar citations 0 · Semantic Scholar influential citations 0
Providers: Hugging Face · N/A OpenAlex · N/A Publisher · N/A Semantic Scholar · Citations 0 · Influential citations 0 X · N/A Fetched 2026-08-28 14:26:48.074750 UTC

TL;DR - An arXiv paper reframing context robustness as "selective trust": models should reject misleading external context without becoming blind to helpful context, and it introduces a benchmark, a metric, and a DPO-based training method to get there.

  • MIST benchmark: human-annotated, rendering each reasoning item under four matched conditions — clean, misleading, correct-context, and irrelevant-context — so trust and resistance can be measured separately.
  • SC2W metric: a paired measure counting how often an injected misleading signal flips a clean-correct answer to wrong; a benchmark study finds this susceptibility is universal across models.
  • SCOPE method: mines clean-correct/misleading-wrong failure pairs and applies a standard DPO objective over matched preference pairs balanced equally across all four conditions, rather than training only on misleading items.
  • Reported effect: substantially lower SC2W on popular open-source models while preserving accuracy when added context is clean, correct, or irrelevant — the paper's core argument being that resistance alone is the wrong evaluation target.
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