CUB: Benchmarking Context Utilisation Techniques for Language Models
Lovisa Hagström, Youna Kim Seoul National University, Haeun Yu, Sang-goo Lee Seoul National University, Richard Johansson Chalmers University of Technology and Göteborg University, Hyunsoo Cho Ewha Women's University, Isabelle Augenstein University of Copenhagen
Incorporating external knowledge is crucial for knowledge-intensive tasks, such as question answering and fact checking. However, language models (LMs) may ignore relevant information that contradicts outdated parametric memory or be distracted by irrelevant contexts. While many context utilisation manipulation techniques (CMTs) have recently been proposed to alleviate these issues, few have seen systematic comparison. In this paper, we develop CUB (Context Utilisation Benchmark) - the first comprehensive benchmark designed to help diagnose CMTs under diverse noisy context conditions within retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). With this benchmark, we conduct the most extensive evaluation to date of seven state-of-the-art methods, representative of the main categories of CMTs, across three diverse datasets and tasks, applied to 11 LMs. Our findings expose critical gaps in current CMT evaluation practices, demonstrating the need for holistic testing. We reveal that most existing CMTs struggle to handle the full spectrum of context types encountered in real-world RAG scenarios. We also find that many CMTs display inflated performance on simple synthesised datasets, compared to more realistic datasets with naturally occurring samples.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表