The Company a Question Keeps: Auditing Open Jev-Style Models for Retrieval

Abstract

Jev's documented interface evaluates typed questions independently against shared evidence. We audit request independence in seven open Jev-style checkpoints on 276 constructed three-passage states from 92 TREC retrieval queries. Paired interventions separately change requested questions, displayed evidence, and candidate eligibility. Request expansion induces strict binary flips in 9.1%/8.0% of Nimble's judgments and changes 21.4%/18.9% of selection-or-abstention actions in TREC DL2019/2020 under a threshold of 0.5 fixed before inference. Correct-action rates change by 0.0/+8.2 percentage points, respectively, with 95% query-bootstrap intervals of [-6.0,6.0] and [3.8,12.6]. Field masking traces all 70 request-set flips to the schema fields serialized into each scoring prompt. In Von, fixing a shared separator's position eliminates two eligibility-induced preference flips in selected diagnostic states. Laya-typed's default CUDA path produces five passage swaps without strict binary flips, and both yearly action-change intervals include zero; in an FP32 rerun, its probability movement vanishes at the model's four-decimal reporting resolution.