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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