# No-Worse Context-Aware Decoding: Preventing Neutral Regression in Context-Conditioned Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.16686 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.16686/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 22 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09600/) (2018)
- [FActScore: Fine-grained Atomic Evaluation of Factual Precision in Long Form Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14251/) (2023)
- [When Not to Trust Language Models: Investigating Effectiveness of Parametric and Non-Parametric Memories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10511/) (2022)
- [Latent Retrieval for Weakly Supervised Open Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00300/) (2019)
- [Evaluating the Factual Consistency of Abstractive Text Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.12840/) (2019)
- [Dynamic Prompt Learning via Policy Gradient for Semi-structured Mathematical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14610/) (2022)
- [MiniCheck: Efficient Fact-Checking of LLMs on Grounding Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10774/) (2024)
- [ExpertQA: Expert-Curated Questions and Attributed Answers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07852/) (2023)
- [TofuEval: Evaluating Hallucinations of LLMs on Topic-Focused Dialogue Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13249/) (2024)
- [Uncertainty-Based Abstention in LLMs Improves Safety and Reduces Hallucinations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10960/) (2024)
- [AdaCAD: Adaptively Decoding to Balance Conflicts between Contextual and Parametric Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07394/) (2024)
- [Fine-Grained Natural Language Inference Based Faithfulness Evaluation for Diverse Summarisation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17630/) (2024)
- [SFR-RAG: Towards Contextually Faithful LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.09916/) (2024)
- [CoCoA: Confidence and Context-Aware Adaptive Decoding for Resolving Knowledge Conflicts in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17670/) (2025)
- [FactTest: Factuality Testing in Large Language Models with Finite-Sample and Distribution-Free Guarantees](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02603/) (2024)
- ["Lost-in-the-Later": Framework for Quantifying Contextual Grounding in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05424/) (2025)
- [Replace, Don't Expand: Mitigating Context Dilution in Multi-Hop RAG via Fixed-Budget Evidence Assembly](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10787/) (2025)
- [Dynamic Context Selection for Retrieval-Augmented Generation: Mitigating Distractors and Positional Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.14313/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Wrong Design Intent Is Worse Than Never Conditioning: A Derangement-Control Diagnosis of Header Conditioning in CAD Program Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.23191/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models (LLMs) can answer questions and summarize documents when conditioned on external contexts (e.g., retrieved evidence), yet context use remains unreliable: models may overwrite an already-correct output (neutral regression) even when the context is non-informative. We formalize neutral regression as a do-no-harm requirement and quantify it by measuring accuracy drops on baseline-correct items under answer-consistent contexts. We propose No-Worse Context-Aware Decoding (NWCAD), a decode-time adapter built on a two-stream setup with a two-stage gate: it backs off to no-context decoding when the context is non-informative, and otherwise uses context-conditioned decoding with a CAD-style fallback under uncertainty. We evaluate NWCAD on benchmarks that separate do-no-harm reliability from context utilization (accuracy gains on genuinely helpful contexts). NWCAD prevents neutral regression on baseline-correct items while preserving strong context-driven accuracy on helpful contexts.