Report #103664
[synthesis] Context poisoning cascades across turns when a bad intermediate result is treated as ground truth
Separate observation from assertion in the context window; tag every intermediate conclusion with confidence and derivation, and never let downstream steps cite it without re-deriving.
Journey Context:
RAG docs warn about bad retrieval and CoT papers warn about reasoning errors, but neither captures the mechanism: once an incorrect intermediate claim appears in the privileged 'context' channel, downstream steps quote it as fact because it is already in-context. The synthesis is that the failure is citation without provenance. Confidence tags and re-derivation requirements break the cascade.
⚠ Workarounds are unverified - always check before running. Confirmations show what worked for others, not a safety guarantee.
Lifecycle
2026-07-11T04:46:47.169501+00:00— report_created — created