# What Do Rationales Communicate? A Message-Intervention Study in Role-Specialized QA

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.00018 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.00018/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11366/) (2023)
- [Let's Verify Step by Step](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.20050/) (2023)
- [HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09600/) (2018)
- [AutoGen: Enabling Next-Gen LLM Applications via Multi-Agent Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08155/) (2023)
- [Constructing A Multi-hop QA Dataset for Comprehensive Evaluation of Reasoning Steps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.01060/) (2020)
- [Language Models Don't Always Say What They Think: Unfaithful Explanations in Chain-of-Thought Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04388/) (2023)
- [Towards Faithfully Interpretable NLP Systems: How should we define and evaluate faithfulness?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.03685/) (2020)
- [Multi-Agent Collaboration Mechanisms: A Survey of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.06322/) (2025)
- [Faithfulness Tests for Natural Language Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18029/) (2023)
- [On Measuring Faithfulness or Self-consistency of Natural Language Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07466/) (2023)
- [Talk Isn't Always Cheap: Understanding Failure Modes in Multi-Agent Debate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.05396/) (2025)
- [Measuring Chain of Thought Faithfulness by Unlearning Reasoning Steps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14829/) (2025)
- [Reassessing Extractive QA Datasets at Scale: LLM-as-a-Judge and In-Depth Analyses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11972/) (2025)
- [Verify Before You Commit: Towards Faithful Reasoning in LLM Agents via Self-Auditing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08401/) (2026)
- [Not All Flips Are Conformity: Decomposing Stance Convergence in Multi-Agent LLM Debate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.00820/) (2026)
- [CLEV: LLM-Based Evaluation Through Lightweight Efficient Voting for Free-Form Question-Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08542/) (2025)
- [Evaluating Chain-of-Thought Reasoning through Reusability and Verifiability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.17544/) (2026)
- [Preventing Error Propagation in Multi-Agent AI through Runtime Monitoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.29026/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Role-specialized QA pipelines increasingly pass rationales from a reasoner to a verifier, but it is unclear what this message actually buys: better answers, stronger support assessment, or a new failure surface. We introduce a message-intervention diagnostic that fixes the evidence and candidate answer while varying only the rationale passed across the reasoner-to-verifier boundary. On 400 MuSiQue, HotpotQA, and 2WikiMultiHopQA examples with DeepSeek as generator and verifier, faithful rationales add almost no answer accuracy over no rationale, while corrupted rationales strongly alter support judgments. Under a blind verifier prompt, harmless paraphrases shift support by only 0--2.5%, whereas corrupted rationales shift support by 10--22%; an explicit rationale-checking prompt amplifies the same pattern to 34--55%. Final answers move less (2--30%), and only 2.9--35.3% of corrupted support flips co-occur with answer changes. Human audits show why this matters: 16/42 valid corruptions are corruption-overtrust cases, and blind humans reject or mark unclear 9/10 audited corrupted rationales that the model accepts. Cross-model and task-boundary checks show when the channel is active, amplified, inert, or folded into the task label. Rationale sharing should be evaluated as a verification-message mechanism, not merely as a route to higher answer accuracy.