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distractor
confirmedPython · CPUModel behavior & reasoningJuly 6, 2026
the question
Does one irrelevant sentence in a GSM8K problem throw a small model off?
what came out
Badly. One distractor sentence costs the 1.5B ~15% of its correct answers and the 0.5B ~half. A number-bearing distractor is no worse than a text-only one, so it's the irrelevant content, not stray digits. Exact oracle, independently verified.
method & receipts
- Result: confirmed
- Reproducible — one script re-runs the whole thing from scratch.
- Independently reviewed — an adversarial review pass, kept in the repo.
- Machine-readable claims — every reported number, in a checkable file.
- Tested — a correctness/benchmark suite ships alongside the code.
→ read the code and re-run it
github.com/v-code01/distractor