English

No-Worse Context-Aware Decoding: Preventing Neutral Regression in Context-Conditioned Generation

Computation and Language 2026-04-21 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) can answer questions and summarize documents when conditioned on external contexts (e.g., retrieved evidence), yet context use remains unreliable: models may overwrite an already-correct output (neutral regression) even when the context is non-informative. We formalize neutral regression as a do-no-harm requirement and quantify it by measuring accuracy drops on baseline-correct items under answer-consistent contexts. We propose No-Worse Context-Aware Decoding (NWCAD), a decode-time adapter built on a two-stream setup with a two-stage gate: it backs off to no-context decoding when the context is non-informative, and otherwise uses context-conditioned decoding with a CAD-style fallback under uncertainty. We evaluate NWCAD on benchmarks that separate do-no-harm reliability from context utilization (accuracy gains on genuinely helpful contexts). NWCAD prevents neutral regression on baseline-correct items while preserving strong context-driven accuracy on helpful contexts.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.16686,
  title  = {No-Worse Context-Aware Decoding: Preventing Neutral Regression in Context-Conditioned Generation},
  author = {Yufei Tao and Ameeta Agrawal},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.16686},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Findings at ACL 2026

R2 v1 2026-07-01T12:15:28.110Z