A Reality Check of Inference-Time Context Augmentation Methods

Overview & Synopsis

Large language models (LLMs) often fail to utilise the context given in the input, resulting in hallucinations or a fallback to parametric knowledge. Context augmentation methods aim to improve model performance by modifying the input, from inserting filler tokens that add computational time to adding relevant content such as elaboration of a context during inference. However, these methods have been evaluated in isolation and only by their performance gains, leaving it unclear how they compare and whether they reliably improve performance. In this paper, we present an evaluation framework spanning five methods that differ in how informative the inserted content is and apply them at the sentence level across seven models spanning multiple sizes on three datasets. We find that accuracy gains are not always genuine improvements but undirected perturbations: the methods correct some predictions while breaking others, particularly when the inserted text allows only for more computational time. Our analysis reveals that methods that bring no additional content primarily change model predictions near the decision boundary. Our findings highlight the need to evaluate the reliability of the accuracy gains before adopting them in practice.