arXiv Computation and Language

Memory vs. Context? Influential Factors of Factual Recall in Language Models

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 10

Do LLMs Make More Mistakes If They Do Not Believe the Input Data?

The study investigates whether large language models (LLMs) are more prone to errors when they doubt the plausibility of input data, a phenomenon termed context‑memory conflict. Using non‑English and low‑resource language datasets, the authors generate text from factual, counterfactual, and fictional RDF triples in English, Czech, Slovak, and Upper Sorbian, and evaluate faithfulness with both human annotations and an LLM judge (Kimi K3). Contrary to expectations, the results show only a weak context‑memory conflict: counterfactual inputs receive slightly lower faithfulness scores than factual ones, and the choice of LLM judge can significantly affect perceived conflict strength.

By Peter Kochelka, Ale\v{s} Manuel Pap\'a\v{c}ek, Vojt\v{e}ch Dvo\v{r}\'ak, Ond\v{r}ej Du\v{s}ek
arXiv AI
Jun 2

Connecting the Dots: Benchmarking Reflective Memory in Long-Horizon Dialogue

arXiv:2606. 01223v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite substantial progress in long-context modeling, existing benchmarks remain confined to factual memory for explicit recall, failing to measure the reflective memory required to synthesize fragmented, multimodal cues into high-level interpretations.

By Jingjie Lin, Bingbing Wang, Zihan Wang, Zhengda Jin, Weiming Qiao, Jing Li, Ruifeng Xu
arXiv AI
Sep 4

When Users Don't Ask: Benchmarking Context-Driven Memory Retrieval in Conversational Agents

The paper introduces LOCOMO-CONV, a conversational memory benchmark that expands on the existing LoCoMo dataset with four query styles—dialog, implicit, counterfactual, and composed—designed to evaluate memory systems in realistic conversational settings. Experiments across five memory systems reveal that conversational framing uncovers significant retrieval gaps missed by traditional QA benchmarks, particularly for implicit and composed queries, and that strong retrieval does not necessarily translate into higher response quality. The study also highlights silent grounding in implicit queries, where memory enhances contextual grounding without explicitly presenting the gold fact, suggesting a need for reasoning-based memory elaboration.

By Wen-Yu Chang, Yun-Nung Chen
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 14

The Illusion of Robustness: Aggregate Accuracy Hides Prediction Flips under Task-Irrelevant Context

As large language models (LLMs) grow more capable, they are increasingly deployed in context-rich settings where task inputs are often accompanied by long, partially irrelevant context. In a controlled setting, we find that state-of-the-art models often appear robust to task-irrelevant context at the aggregate level: prepending it to benchmark questions causes little change in overall accuracy.

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
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 2

ReContext: Recursive Evidence Replay as LLM Harness for Long-Context Reasoning

Understanding and reasoning over long contexts has become a key requirement for deploying large language models (LLMs) in realistic applications. Although recent LLMs support increasingly long context windows, they often fail to use relevant evidence that is already present in the input, revealing a gap between context access and effective context utilization.