# Defending Against Disinformation Attacks in Open-Domain Question Answering Source: [Defending Against Disinformation Attacks in Open-Domain Question Answering]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2025-10-26T02:24:11.561Z Authors: Orion Weller, Aleem Khan, Nathaniel Weir, Dawn Lawrie, Benjamin Van Durme Published: 2022-12-20T05:25:01.000Z ## Abstract Recent work in open-domain question answering (ODQA) has shown that adversarial poisoning of the search collection can cause large drops in accuracy for production systems. However, little to no work has proposed methods to defend against these attacks. To do so, we rely on the intuition that redundant information often exists in large corpora. To find it, we introduce a method that uses query augmentation to search for a diverse set of passages that could answer the original question but are less likely to have been poisoned. We integrate these new passages into the model through the design of a novel confidence method, comparing the predicted answer to its appearance in the retrieved contexts (what we call Confidence from Answer Redundancy, i.e. CAR). Together these methods allow for a simple but effective way to defend against poisoning attacks that provides gains of nearly 20% exact match across varying levels of data poisoning/knowledge conflicts. ## Recorded benchmark results A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage. ## Original sources and implementation [Original paper]() [PDF]()