Preference Is Not Intervention: The Structure and Stability Boundaries of Reader-Specific Evidence Utility

Excerpt

arXiv:2608.17781v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: ML systems increasingly condition decisions on downstream model identity, but this is useful only if model-specific differences form reusable structure rather than input-local interactions. We test this in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), where evidence utility can be measured under controlled interventions. Holding query, evidence, task, scoring, and intervention fixed, nine readers disagree on effect sign in 33\% of jointly affected cells; r