arXiv AI

ParamMute: Suppressing Knowledge-Critical FFNs for Faithful Retrieval-Augmented Generation

arXiv:2502. 15543v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) integrated with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) have improved factuality by grounding outputs in external evidence.

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 Computation and Language
Sep 11

Probing for Knowledge Attribution in Large Language Models

The paper introduces a method for identifying the dominant knowledge source behind large language model (LLM) outputs, distinguishing between faithfulness violations (misuse of provided context) and factuality violations (errors in internal knowledge). A simple linear probe trained on hidden representations can reliably classify this source, and the authors present AttriWiki, a self‑supervised pipeline that generates labeled training data by prompting models to recall withheld entities or read them from context. Probes trained on AttriWiki achieve high Macro‑F1 scores across several models and datasets, generalize zero‑shot to a benchmark, and show that attribution mismatches can increase error rates by up to 70%. "whyItMatters":"The study demonstrates that knowing the source of an LLM’s answer is crucial for effective mitigation of hallucinations, as attribution mismatches significantly raise error rates."

By Ivo Brink, Alexander Boer, Dennis Ulmer
arXiv AI
Aug 11

Bounding Hallucinations: Merlin-Arthur Protocols for Mutual-Information Bounds in Language Models

arXiv:2512. 11614v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) relies on retrieved context to guide large language models (LLM), yet treats the retrieval as a heuristic rather than verifiable evidence -- leading to unsupported answers, hallucinations, and reliance on spurious context.

By Bj\"orn Deiseroth, Max Henning H\"oth, Kristian Kersting, Letitia Parcalabescu
arXiv AI
Aug 20

From Storage to Access: Verifiable Activation of Parametric Knowledge in LLMs via Explicit Priming and Implicit Reasoning

The paper introduces VAKE, a two‑stage reinforcement‑learning framework that activates latent factual knowledge in large language models. In the Priming stage, the model explicitly inserts bridging triples into an insufficient subgraph, guided by rewards from a frozen model’s answers. The Reasoning stage then trains the model to answer from the original input, demonstrating that the elicitation capability transfers to implicit reasoning and consistently outperforms baselines across multiple benchmarks and model sizes.

By Zuocheng Ying, Yang Yang, Yumou Wu, Chuanbo Zhu, Jiarui Wang, Ziqi Wu, Jingming Cai, Junqing Yu, Zikai Song
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 2

Resonant Context Anchoring: Decoupling Attention Routing and Signal Gain at Inference Time

arXiv:2606. 01923v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently exhibit "contextual disregard" when faced with input evidence that conflicts with their internal parametric memory, leading to persistent factual hallucinations.

By Mingkuan Zhao, Yide Gao, Wentao Hu, Suquan Chen, Tianchen Huang, Zhenhua An, Zetao Chang, Xiayu Sun, Yuheng Min
arXiv Machine Learning
5d 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 Computation and Language
Sep 17

Multi-Hop Knowledge Composition is Bound by Pretraining Exposure

Large Language Models struggle with implicit multi‑hop reasoning, correctly answering individual facts but failing to combine them in a single pass. In a controlled setting, the authors show that this failure persists even with high 1‑hop accuracy, indicating it is due to pretraining exposure rather than missing knowledge. They test nine data‑centric augmentation formats and find that only individuals seen in compositional contexts during pretraining enable transfer to unseen questions, proving exposure to such contexts is necessary for implicit multi‑hop reasoning.

By Yannis Karmim, Luis Marti, Djam\'e Seddah, Valentin Barri\`ere