Collection-Date Assignment Redirects Answers in Temporal QA

Minsu Oh, Seunghui Jwa, Soo Kyun Kim, Yeo-Chan Yoon

A collection date records when a source revision was acquired, not when its contents changed. Can assigning this metadata redirect temporal question answering despite unchanged evidence? Swapping the question day and following day between two revisions lowers later-reference exact match (EM) by 37.6-51.4 percentage points across five open-weight LLMs on 595 Wikipedia pages, replicated on 128 disjoint pages. Previous-day swaps retain 29.0-39.6-point losses on 497 pages. Seven prompt variants, including explicit ignore-collection instructions and archived-revision provenance, retain the effect. Fictional answers and English month-name question dates show that remembered answers and identical date strings are unnecessary. Matched thinking reduces Qwen3.5's penalty from 30.1 to 11.1 points, while native reasoners vary. Two API LLMs show small Wikipedia swap effects and rarely shift to earlier answers on fictional records. Large swap-induced losses concentrate around the question date; swaps between distant dates have much smaller effects. Adding fields containing one observed acquisition date lowers EM relative to omission in three of five LLMs after correction. The diagnostic…