Relevant but Incomplete: Referential Dangling as a Paradigm-Level Failure Mode in Hard Prompt Compression
Hard prompt compression can keep the answer while dropping the text that makes the answer identifiable.
The paper calls this “referential dangling”: a retained passage points to missing evidence needed to resolve the entity or relation. Across tested QA settings, hard compressors frequently left multi-hop answer paths incomplete, including rates up to 60% on a shared HotpotQA bridge set. Restoring the omitted supporting paragraph sharply improved accuracy under the same token budget, and a small classifier-based restoration step gave a smaller automatic gain. HF Daily Papers' note
The paper calls this “referential dangling”: a retained passage points to missing evidence needed to resolve the entity or relation. Across tested QA settings, hard compressors frequently left multi-hop answer paths incomplete, including rates up to 60% on a shared HotpotQA bridge set. Restoring the omitted supporting paragraph sharply improved accuracy under the same token budget, and a small classifier-based restoration step gave a smaller automatic gain. HF Daily Papers' note
score 5