The Drill-Down and Fabricate Test (DDFT): A Protocol for Measuring Epistemic Robustness in Language Models

Current language model evaluations measure what models know under ideal conditions but not how robustly they know it under realistic stress. We introduce the Drill-Down and Fabricate Test (DDFT), a protocol that measures epistemic robustness: a model's ability to maintain factual accuracy under progressive semantic compression and adversarial fabrication.