arXiv Computation and Language

PACE: Towards Surfacing Hidden Conflicts in User Requests

The paper introduces PACE, a dataset that tests whether personalized assistants can detect hidden conflicts in user requests by integrating implicit, egocentric knowledge from a knowledge base. PACE pairs user requests with persona-specific facts, requiring models to retrieve contextual evidence before deciding if a request is inappropriate. The authors also propose PaceMaker, a multi-agent system that improves conflict detection by coordinating query reformulation, multi-hop graph traversal, and conflict-aware filtering, outperforming existing methods on the PACE benchmark.

arXiv AI
Jun 19

Navigating Unreliable Parametric and Contextual Knowledge: Explicit Knowledge Conflict Resolution for LLM Inference

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 AI
Sep 4

KC-Bench: A Dynamic Interactive Benchmark for Evaluating Knowledge Conflicts in LLM Agents

KC-Bench is a dynamic interactive benchmark designed to evaluate how large language model agents reconcile user instructions, internal knowledge, and real‑time environmental observations. It contains 238 manually curated multi‑turn tasks that test world‑knowledge conflicts, input inconsistencies, and multi‑source temporal conflicts, using a user simulator, stateful tools, deterministic environment assertions, an open‑source natural‑language evaluator, and human trajectory verification. Evaluation of nine models—including DeepSeek‑V4‑Flash, GLM‑5.2, and MiniMax‑M3—reveals significant cross‑domain variation, with no model reliably handling factual correction, identity consistency checking, and temporal conflict resolution across all settings, and shows that missed conflicts can propagate to tool calls or synthetic protected‑data flows.

By Yaxing Lyu, Shengjie Zhou, Binbin Toh, Pengyu Zhu, Lijun Li
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 4

Large Language Models in Resolving Contextual Knowledge Conflicts

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
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 2

Large Language Models in Resolving Contextual Knowledge Conflicts

The paper examines how large language models resolve conflicts that arise within contextual knowledge, rather than between internal knowledge and external context. It introduces a taxonomy of six contextual conflict types and presents the ContextConflict dataset with 5,781 samples covering reasoning and summarization tasks. Experiments on nine LLMs reveal persistent shortcomings in conflict resolution, uncover a bias toward earlier evidence, and propose a training‑free steering method that improves accuracy and summary quality.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 3

KC-Bench: A Dynamic Interactive Benchmark for Evaluating Knowledge Conflicts in LLM Agents

KC-Bench is a dynamic interactive benchmark designed to evaluate how large language model agents reconcile user instructions, internal knowledge, and real‑time environmental observations. It consists of 238 manually curated multi‑turn tasks that test world‑knowledge conflicts, input inconsistencies, and multi‑source temporal conflicts, using a user simulator, stateful tools, deterministic environment assertions, an open‑source natural‑language evaluator, and human trajectory verification. Evaluation of nine models—including DeepSeek‑V4‑Flash, GLM‑5.2, and MiniMax‑M3—reveals significant cross‑domain variation, with no model reliably handling factual correction, identity consistency, and temporal conflict resolution across all settings, and shows that missed conflicts can propagate to tool calls or synthetic protected‑data flows.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 18

Towards Proactive Detection of User-Side Implicit Conflicts in Human-LLM Dialogue

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
arXiv AI
Sep 4

Do GUI Agents Know When Not to Act? Enabling Conflict-Aware Termination for Multimodal GUI Agents

The paper introduces CONFLICTGUI, a benchmark that tests GUI agents on instruction-internal and instruction‑GUI context conflicts, revealing that many agents over‑comply with infeasible instructions. To address this, the authors propose CONFLICTGUARD, an inference‑time framework that couples a feasibility verification protocol with a conditional action modulation mechanism, enabling agents to assess instruction logic and GUI evidence before acting. Experiments on five agents show that CONFLICTGUARD significantly improves conflict‑task success while maintaining normal task performance.

By Zhaoyuan Huang, Tianjie Ju, Pengzhou Cheng, Zheng Wu, Yansi Li, Chuanbiao Song, Jun Lan, Huijia Zhu, Weiqiang Wang, Zhuosheng Zhang
arXiv Machine Learning
3d ago

Parameters vs. Context: TRACE Fine-Tuning for Robust Retrieval-Augmented Generation

The paper introduces TRACE, a fine‑tuning framework for Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG) that addresses conflicts between retrieved knowledge and a model’s internal knowledge. TRACE uses multi‑agent debate traces to identify correct and incorrect candidates and answer‑shift patterns, providing fine‑grained supervision for reliable knowledge‑source selection. It also incorporates an answer‑completeness regularization mechanism to prevent empty, overly short, or prematurely terminated responses, thereby improving robustness against misleading retrieved content and enhancing answer quality.

By Zhengchen Huang, Yundong Sun, Minrui Song, Shuanglong Yao, Ye Liu, Ji Chen, Xing Wang
arXiv AI
Sep 10

How AI Models Manage Epistemic Authority: A Taxonomy and Comparative Analysis of Responses to User Disagreement

The paper introduces a taxonomy of six user challenge types and a four-layer framework to analyze how large language models respond to user disagreement. Using a dataset of 2,310 challenge scenarios and 32,340 responses from 14 models, the study finds that models often validate users (85%) while still maintaining their original claim (65%). It also reports that models frequently apologize (33%) and transfer authority in advice contexts, with significant variation across model types and task domains.

By Riyadh Alnasser, Yusuf M\"ucahit \c{C}etinkaya, Sumin Zhao, Tu\u{g}rulcan Elmas