# Clarification Is Not Enough: Post-Clarification Answering Remains the Bottleneck in Multi-Turn QA

Source: [Clarification Is Not Enough: Post-Clarification Answering Remains the Bottleneck in Multi-Turn QA](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/6a15295fdbd7150506f7e291>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2026-05-27T05:00:13.467Z

Authors: Jinyan Su, Jennifer Healey

Published: 2026-05-24T18:06:09.000Z

## Abstract

Pluralistic alignment requires systems to adapt to diverse user values, communication styles, and contextual assumptions. We believe that a foundational prerequisite for such alignment enabling accurate preference elicitation from people when their intent is under-specified or ambiguous. We study the problem of preference elicitation in multi-turn question answering by decomposing the problem into two components: a \\textbf{clarification policy}, which decides whether to ask a clarifying question or answer directly, and \\textbf{post-clarification answering}, which produces the correct final answer once the missing information is provided. We show, using the PACIFIC benchmark, that supervised fine-tuning rapidly improves the clarification policy, however, final answer accuracy remains substantially lower even when the model takes the correct action. This gap indicates that understanding and correctly interpreting the user's response is the critical gap in multi-turn question-answering systems.

## 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](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25204>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2605.25204.pdf>)