The paper introduces a taxonomy of six types of contextual knowledge conflicts—factual, inferential, temporal, granularity, perspective, and ambiguity—and presents the ContextConflict dataset with 5,781 samples covering reasoning and summarization tasks. Experiments on nine large language models reveal that current models struggle to resolve these conflicts, exhibit a bias toward earlier evidence, and show latent awareness of conflicts in their internal representations. The authors propose a training‑free, label‑free steering method that adjusts activations to better incorporate evidence, consistently improving reasoning accuracy and producing higher‑quality, balanced summaries on the dataset.
By Xinye Yang, Zhenyang Liu, Ruisi Li, Yuanyuan Lei
arXiv:2606. 20245v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have achieved strong performance across a wide range of language-based tasks by leveraging both extensive parametric knowledge and in-context learning ability, enabling them to incorporate external information provided in the input prompt.
By Huang Peng, Jiuyang Tang, Weixin Zeng, Hao Xu, Xiang Zhao
arXiv:2508. 01273v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Explicit knowledge conflicts, occurring when retrieved contexts contain contradictory information, pose a fundamental challenge for Large Language Models (LLMs) as they integrate increasingly diverse data sources.
By Xianda Zheng, Zijian Huang, Meng-Fen Chiang, Jiamou Liu, Yuan Fang, Michael Witbrock, Kaiqi Zhao
arXiv:2609.38799v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Understanding multi-perspective alternative narratives requires identifying how their information agrees, conflicts, or differs across sources. Existin...
By Eftekhar Hossain, Santu Karmaker
arXiv:2601. 09445v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In language models (LMs), intra-memory knowledge conflict arises when inconsistent information about the same subject is encoded within the model's parametric knowledge.
By Minh Vu Pham, Hsuvas Borkakoty, Yufang Hou
arXiv:2602. 20094v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) witness increasing deployment in complex, high-stakes decision-making scenarios, it becomes imperative to ground their reasoning in causality rather than spurious correlations.
By Yuzhe Wang, Yaochen Zhu, Jundong Li
arXiv:2608. 13921v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents increasingly maintain personal memory across sessions, but it can conflict.
By Lu Yang, Shusheng Xu, Zhuoran Li, Tongkai Yang, Longbo Huang
arXiv:2606. 26437v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Existing metrics for factuality and faithfulness evaluate whether an answer is supported or contradicted by its grounding documents, but they fail to capture when both supporting and contradicting evidence coexist.
By Siyi Liu, Aaron Halfaker, Dan Roth, Patrick Xia
arXiv:2607. 10562v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating the multi-hop reasoning capabilities of large language models remains a significant challenge.
By JungMin Yun, JuneHyoung Kwon, YoungBin Kim
The paper introduces Causal-Counterfactual RAG, a new framework that augments Retrieval-Augmented Generation with explicit causal graphs and counterfactual reasoning. By incorporating cause‑effect relationships into retrieval and evaluating both direct causal evidence and counterfactual scenarios, the approach aims to produce more robust, accurate, and interpretable answers. This method seeks to maintain contextual coherence, reduce hallucinations, and improve reasoning fidelity compared to traditional RAG systems.
By Harshad Khadilkar, Abhay Gupta
The paper introduces UC-Bench, a human‑annotated benchmark for detecting user‑side implicit conflicts in Human‑LLM dialogue, a problem largely overlooked compared to LLM‑side conflicts. Experiments show current LLMs struggle with these conflicts, especially when they stem from implicit incompatibilities in dialogue history. To address this, the authors propose SynUC, a constraint‑guided data synthesis method that generates a new training set, UC‑Data, which improves performance of lightweight LLMs on UC‑Bench compared to larger general‑purpose models and existing synthesis approaches.
By Jinqiang Wang, Tao Zhu, Huansheng Ning
LLM agents increasingly maintain personal memory across sessions, but it can conflict. Preferences depend on context, behavior evolves, and sources can conflict. When a query lacks context, time, or s...