Rewriting inputs to improve frozen downstream models has become a common strategy in modern NLP pipelines. Prior work on incremental dialogue discourse parsing (DDP) shows that supervised clarification models can rewrite fragmentary or underspecified utterances, such as resolving ellipsis or references, to improve parsing accuracy. In this work, we revisit this idea under realistic deployment conditions, where no clarification supervision is available and the clarifier must rely on zero-shot prompting or feedback from a frozen parser. Across three Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT) datasets and multiple parsers, we find that last-utterance clarification is far less reliable than suggested by supervised settings. Parser-agnostic rewriting often introduces more regressions than repairs, as edits that enable fixes also disrupt discourse cues relied upon by the parser. A best-of-8 rewriting analysis further reveals a practical ceiling: a large fraction of errors are not repairable through input rewriting alone. A parser-aware clarifier trained with GRPO reduces regressions by up to 37% by learning conservative abstention, yet still fails to produce selectivity-aware clarifications that consistently improve parsing. Together, these findings recast clarification as a selective intervention problem. We identify rewritability prediction, deciding whether an utterance is repairable before intervention, as the key missing capability for input-side optimization of frozen discourse parsers, and a critical direction for improving agentic pipelines more broadly.
Dialogue failures in language models are usually framed as memory failures: context too long, summaries lossy, a constraint forgotten. We argue this misses a deeper problem: in many conversations the model does not forget, it commits too early. An ambiguous early turn collapses into a single hidden interpretation, and later clarification is filtered through that commitment. We call this early posterior collapse: unresolved user intent collapsing into a committed task state before ambiguity is resolved. We study it with controlled dialogue tasks in writing, planning, and coding using Gemini-2.5-Pro and Gemini-2.5-Flash. Across thousands of trials, the same information in different orders yields different outcomes, even when the final dialogue contains equivalent task-relevant information. This order effect suggests later clarification is treated as extra context rather than a corrective signal: it refines a stale task state without invalidating it. Coding tasks are especially vulnerable, suggesting early assumptions get embedded in structured artifacts such as interfaces and control flow. Standard prompting and memory strategies do not reliably help: summaries can collapse ambiguity, and chain-of-thought can reduce explicit wrong commitment in reasoning traces without improving final task success. These findings motivate uncertainty-preserving state management. If assistants cannot let go of early interpretations, robustness cannot rely on post hoc correction alone; it must keep ambiguous early turns from hardening into one task state. Assistants should hold tentative hypotheses while ambiguity remains, ask before executing when high-impact ambiguity persists, and rebuild from a revised state when later evidence invalidates an earlier reading. Rather than one prompting fix, we aim to redirect research for interactive LLMs from retaining more context toward preserving uncertainty.
Draft-verify-revise is a common LLM orchestration pattern for scaling inference-time compute. One LLM drafts, a second critiques the draft and provides feedback, and a third uses that feedback to revise the draft into the final output. As context cascades between stages, LLMs at different stages can resolve a context-dependent expression such as "previous" differently. When that happens, the expression undergoes a deictic shift, a change in what it refers to. This phenomenon was studied with a synthetic dataset of 10 base examples, each rendered in three conditions. Holding the shared components constant, the conditions varied whether the draft stage LLM (the assistant) or the verify stage LLM (the grader) resolved the expression correctly, and how much independent reasoning the revise stage LLM (the meta-evaluator) needed to determine which reading was correct. Six models from three providers were tested across 21 reasoning effort configurations using e-values for sequential testing, in a primary experiment and an ablation experiment that removed error classification labels from the grader's feedback. A separate LLM analyzed the meta-evaluator's stated rationale for each wrong verdict. Balanced accuracy (the unweighted mean of sensitivity and specificity) ranged from 0.156, below chance, to near-perfect. GPT-5.2 rose from 0.156 without reasoning to 0.942 at its highest reasoning effort level, while Gemini 3 Pro stayed above 0.94 at every level. Gemini 3 Pro at low reasoning effort outscored GPT-5.2 at xhigh reasoning effort for roughly 5% of the cost per trial. When the meta-evaluator erred, it tended to rely on surface cues rather than operational reasoning. Context engineers implementing draft-verify-revise pipelines should be wary of deictic shifts and make the intended referent explicit at each stage.
LLMs reliably correct false claims when presented in isolation, yet when the same claims are embedded in task-oriented requests, they often comply rather than correct. We term this failure mode \emph{correction suppression} and construct a benchmark of 300 false premises to systematically evaluate it across eight models. Suppression rates range from 19% to 90%, with four models exceeding 80%, establishing correction suppression as a prevalent and severe phenomenon. Mechanistic analysis reveals that suppression is not a knowledge failure: the model registers the error internally but task context diverts early-layer attention from the false claim as output intent crystallizes toward compliance at middle layers. We characterize this as \emph{knowing but not correcting} -- suppression occurs at response selection rather than knowledge encoding. Guided by this mechanism, we propose two training-free interventions. Correction Direction Steering (CDS) estimates a correction-compliance direction from matched pairs and injects it at middle layers before output intent crystallizes. Dynamic Payload Amplification (DPA) localizes payload tokens via attention divergence between early and late layers and amplifies their representation at the final layer, requiring no calibration data. Experiments on Qwen3.5-9B and LLaMA3.1-8B show both methods substantially improve factual strictness. CDS achieves the highest correction rate on Qwen3.5-9B (0%→58.2%). DPA is the only method that preserves or improves reasoning capability on both models. These findings introduce \emph{factual strictness} -- the willingness to uphold accuracy against contextual pressures -- as a new dimension of model reliability.