Stale-Document Poisoning: When Outdated Retrieval Overrides Correct Model Answers

Excerpt

arXiv:2609.31342v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is often used to address outdated knowledge by providing external evidence. But retrieval helps only when that evidence is still valid. We identify a temporal alignment failure, stale-document poisoning, in which outdated evidence makes a model wrong despite answering correctly without retrieval. We construct a benchmark of 317 verified knowledge reversals across medicine, law, software, and platform policy, gro