arXiv Computation and Language

To Copy or Not to Copy: Copying Is Easier to Induce Than Recall

arXiv AI
Jul 28

TokenMem: Faithful Knowledge Injection for Frozen LLMs

arXiv:2607. 22625v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhances large language models (LLMs) with external knowledge, but suffers from knowledge conflicts: when retrieved information contradicts parametric memory, the shared self-attention pathway produces unpredictable outputs.

By Chengzhang Yu, Chenyang Zheng, Zening Lu, Yingru He, Yutong Huang, Yiming Zhang, Yue Xu, Zhanpeng Jin
arXiv AI
Jun 24

Quantifying Prior Dominance in RAG Systems

arXiv:2606. 23695v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) grounds Large Language Models in external knowledge, yet current evaluations rely on discrete heuristics that suffer from ''epistemic blindness'' - failing to distinguish genuine contextual information extraction from parametric memory recall.

By Barak Or
arXiv AI
Sep 3

Language Models Can Control Their Own Attention

The paper introduces Declarative Attention (DA), a protocol that lets language models explicitly declare which parts of their context to focus on during generation. By partitioning decoding into full-context, region-specific, and recent-output-only modes, the inference engine can skip large portions of the KV cache, dramatically reducing attended tokens. Experiments on 15 long-context tasks with off-the-shelf models show significant savings (52.0% and 31.1% reductions) with only modest accuracy drops that diminish as model size increases.

By Namgyu Ho, Huzama Ahmad, Woosung Koh, Se-Young Yun, Tal Schuster, Cicero Nogueira dos Santos
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 2

How Do Language Models Choose Between Context and Memory?

The paper investigates how language models decide between contextual information and their internal memory when the two conflict. By estimating "authority directions" from agreement prompts and swapping these directions between matched prompts, the authors show that such interventions can reproduce 30–68% of the shift in source choice across Qwen, Llama, and OLMo models. Cross‑task experiments reveal that authority directions learned on one task transfer only modestly (≈9%) to another, indicating that authority computations are largely task‑specific.

By Benjamin Shih, John Winnicki, Arianna Cao
arXiv AI
Aug 5

Does Forgetting Transfer Across Modalities? A Real-World Benchmark for Cross-Modal Knowledge Unlearning Evaluation

arXiv:2608. 03791v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs), like Large Language Models (LLMs), may memorize sensitive, copyrighted, or harmful knowledge from their pretraining corpora.

By Chunlin Liu, Junnian Chen, Haitong Jiang, Jianyu Zhao, Yingsen Pang, Jingchen Li, Jiabiao He, Youming Lu, Jinhe Bi, Yuntao Du