Discourse-Role Labels as Presentation-Time Variables for Context Use in Language Models

Jianguo Zhu; Xiangmei Li; Wenjie Liu

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arXiv · 2606.04109

Discourse-Role Labels as Presentation-Time Variables for Context Use in Language Models

Jianguo Zhu·Xiangmei Li·Wenjie Liu

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Abstract

Context-augmented language model systems often wrap supplied content with labels such as Reference:, Evidence:, Instruction:, Note:, or Example:, but the effect of these labels on reader-model behavior remains underexplored. We introduce a paired fixed-content probe over 500 MMLU-Pro items: each item receives the same misleading answer-bearing assertion under different discourse-role labels, and adoption is measured by whether the model outputs the injected wrong option. Across GPT-5.5, DeepSeek V4 Pro, Llama-3-8B-Instruct, and Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, Misleading Adoption Rate shifts by 56-84 percentage points. Binding or source-like labels such as Instruction: and Reference: produce high adoption, whereas Example: consistently suppresses it. Paired tests, bootstrap intervals, final-instruction ablations, and Qwen final-step log-probability probes support a label-conditioned candidate preference. Boundary probes show where the effect weakens or persists: arithmetic tasks reduce adoption, passage-shaped external context preserves smaller label gaps, short-answer evaluation rules out option-letter copying, and nested-label conflicts suggest that illustrative framing can delimit adoption scope. A 200-case single-author manual audit confirms that the short-answer contrasts are stable under conservative adjudication. The resulting claim is bounded but practical: context-utilization and reader-side RAG benchmarks should report and control wrapper labels, because presentation choices can change measured reliance on supplied context.

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Jianguo Zhu, Xiangmei Li, Wenjie Liu. 2026-06-02. Discourse-Role Labels as Presentation-Time Variables for Context Use in Language Models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.04109

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