Factual Yet One-Sided: Stance Poisoning and Evidence Balancing in Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Overview & Synopsis

The stance expressed in responses from retrieval-augmented generation systems is significantly influenced by the stance distribution of the retrieved materials. Existing research on knowledge poisoning has primarily targeted factual errors. In contrast, this study focuses on injection attacks in which the facts are correct but the stance on a controversial issue is one-sided. At a mean topic-level poisoning share of 18.9% within the post-injection ProCon documents, all four generation models from different vendors exhibited stance shifts aligned with the poisoning direction; across four concentration levels, the shifts increased monotonically. This paper proposes a Stance-Balancing Middleware positioned between the retriever and the generator. It consists of stance detection, fixed balancing (2 supporting + 2 opposing + 1 neutral), and a debiasing prompt, without introducing additional large language model calls. Across all eight concentration-direction settings, the complete method reduced the magnitude of stance deviation by an estimated 0.106 to 0.350; the six settings at poisoning shares of 11.9%-18.9% remained significant after Holm adjustment (adjusted p