# Detecting Is Not Resolving: The Monitoring Control Gap in Retrieval Augmented LLMs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.27157 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.27157/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in RAG robustness and adaptive retrieval, one of 15 directions in Retrieval-augmented generation.
- Builds on 27 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 May 2026.

## Placed in

- Retrieval-augmented generation / [RAG robustness and adaptive retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/rag/rag-robustness-and-adaptive-retrieval/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [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)
- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [Universal and Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Aligned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15043/) (2023)
- [Language Models (Mostly) Know What They Know](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05221/) (2022)
- [Self-RAG: Learning to Retrieve, Generate, and Critique through Self-Reflection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11511/) (2023)
- [Jailbroken: How Does LLM Safety Training Fail?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02483/) (2023)
- [MS MARCO: A Human Generated MAchine Reading COmprehension Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09268/) (2016)
- [Not what you've signed up for: Compromising Real-World LLM-Integrated Applications with Indirect Prompt Injection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12173/) (2023)
- [Inference-Time Intervention: Eliciting Truthful Answers from a Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03341/) (2023)
- [Red Teaming Language Models with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03286/) (2022)
- [Discovering Latent Knowledge in Language Models Without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03827/) (2022)
- [Teaching Models to Express Their Uncertainty in Words](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14334/) (2022)
- [Scalable Extraction of Training Data from (Production) Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17035/) (2023)
- [Adaptive Chameleon or Stubborn Sloth: Revealing the Behavior of Large Language Models in Knowledge Conflicts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13300/) (2023)
- [Knowledge Conflicts for LLMs: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08319/) (2024)
- [PoisonedRAG: Knowledge Corruption Attacks to Retrieval-Augmented Generation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07867/) (2024)
- [Poisoning Retrieval Corpora by Injecting Adversarial Passages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19156/) (2023)
- [Certifiably Robust RAG against Retrieval Corruption](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15556/) (2024)
- [Rich Knowledge Sources Bring Complex Knowledge Conflicts: Recalibrating Models to Reflect Conflicting Evidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13701/) (2022)
- [Machine Against the RAG: Jamming Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Blocker Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05870/) (2024)
- [TrojanRAG: Retrieval-Augmented Generation Can Be Backdoor Driver in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13401/) (2024)
- [Pandora: Jailbreak GPTs by Retrieval Augmented Generation Poisoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.08416/) (2024)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Conflicting Evidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13079/) (2025)
- [MTRAG: A Multi-Turn Conversational Benchmark for Evaluating Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03468/) (2025)
- [WikiContradict: A Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs on Real-World Knowledge Conflicts from Wikipedia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13805/) (2024)
- [Worse than Zero-shot? A Fact-Checking Dataset for Evaluating the Robustness of RAG Against Misleading Retrievals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16101/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Reasoning Reduces the Influence of Poisoned Context in RAG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.17153/) (2026)
- [Hallucination Across the Reasoning Lifecycle: Interface Visibility, Causal Evidence, and Release Control in Large Reasoning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.05472/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Retrieval-augmented LLMs are deployed for tasks where evidence quality determines action safety, yet evaluation protocols assume that single-turn robustness predicts robustness when evidence accumulates across turns. We show this assumption is fundamentally incorrect. Models exhibit a monitoring-control gap: they readily acknowledge contradictory evidence, yet this awareness fails to constrain their final recommendations - detecting epistemic conflict does not imply resolving it safely. Through a multi-turn document accumulation protocol across four model families (1.5B-32B parameters) and over 50,000 turn-level evaluations, we demonstrate that single-turn diagnostics systematically overestimate RAG safety, that contradiction acknowledgement is uncorrelated with safe resolution, a pattern corroborated by targeted human validation, and that no universal prompt fix exists. Converging mechanism evidence - hidden-state probing, attention analysis, and response-strategy taxonomy - points to action selection as the most plausible locus of the deficit: danger-relevant information is internally represented and receives enhanced attention during unsafe generation, yet fails to constrain output behavior. The gap between what models recognize and what they do must be measured and closed before retrieval-augmented systems can be trusted in high-stakes settings.