The paper introduces concept provenance, a framework that categorizes query concepts into backstory-supported, human-central, human-tail, and candidate answer-side zones to detect knowledge intrusion in LLM-generated search queries. Applying this framework to 77,004 queries across 100 topics, 8 LLMs, and 5 prompt conditions, the authors find that 7.40% of non-generic concepts are candidate answer-side and appear in 97 of 100 topics, with human validation revealing 68.2% relaxed precision and equal contributions from knowledge and deployment intrusion. The study shows that while prompt conditions do not eliminate intrusion, post-generation concept-provenance selection can achieve 99% elimination, positioning concept provenance as a diagnostic tool rather than an evaluation predictor.
arXiv:2607. 23838v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) lets a large language model answer questions using documents retrieved from an external knowledge base at query time.
TriShieldRAG introduces a three‑layered defense for Retrieval‑Augmented Generation: an Ingest Guard that screens documents, a Retrieval Scorer that re‑ranks based on trust, and a Cross‑LLM Consensus that validates evidence across three models. Against the original PoisonedRAG attack on the 2.68M‑passage Natural Questions corpus, the framework reduces attack success from about 79% to 1%. However, adaptive attacks that only alter document formatting can bypass the Ingest Guard and still achieve high success rates, revealing limits of layered defenses that rely on the same retrieved evidence.
arXiv:2608.21230v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Persistent memory makes false information durable: once a false statement is stored, it can be retrieved into future sessions that match it. We measu...
Clarify-Then-Search is a benchmark that tests whether large language models can ask clarification questions to improve the usefulness of deep search results. It uses 518 real-world query pairs from Baidu, where each intent query is paired with an underspecified version. The evaluation involves a clarifier asking up to three questions, a user answerer providing only explicit information, and a rewriter generating a new query that is then searched; performance is measured by a weighted nugget-recall score.
arXiv:2606. 31156v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: RAG systems retrieve documents optimized for answering one query at a time.
The paper evaluates how modern large language models use internal web search to answer factual questions. Using 783 static queries and 288 dynamic queries, the authors find that enabling retrieval improves accuracy on static questions but hurts confidence calibration. On dynamic queries, models often retrieve but still achieve less than 70% accuracy, mainly due to poor query formulation and source selection, indicating that internal web search works better as a quick verification tool than a full information‑retrieval system.
arXiv:2607. 25600v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation improves knowledge-intensive question answering, but indiscriminate retrieval can introduce irrelevant evidence and unnecessary computation.
The paper audits the reproducibility of knowledge‑graph extraction from threat reports by re‑implementing matching rules for only five of twelve systems and re‑scoring ten system outputs under eight protocols. The audit shows that different matching protocols can reverse most pairwise system rankings and that a fixed prediction set can vary from 0.16 to 0.70 F1. The authors also build CTIForge to isolate validation effects, finding that validation changes precision across backbones and increases entity‑type disputes, and they release the full pipeline, protocol suite, and audit records.
arXiv:2609.00470v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) grounds large language models in external corpora, but implicit trust in retrieved documents creates a critical at...
arXiv:2605. 06647v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented agents are increasingly the interface to large knowledge bases, yet most treat retrieval as a black box: they issue exploratory queries, inspect snippets, and reformulate until evidence emerges.
WildSEEK is a new dataset of 3,000 real user information‑seeking queries, manually annotated for risk‑sensitive domains and whether the query is factoid or analytical. The accompanying evaluation framework tests LLM responses against four failure criteria—sycophantic behavior, overreliance, a default US‑centric perspective, and poor handling of vulnerable populations—finding higher failure rates for analytical queries. The authors also train classifiers on WildSEEK to analyze over 1.8 million realistic queries, revealing that more than a third are high‑risk and often analytical.
Agent Zero Memory is a provenance‑aware long‑term memory system for large language model agents that distills user interactions into three parallel memory structures: an episodic timeline, an associative entity‑event knowledge graph, and a semantic, citation‑locked hierarchical documentary memory. Retrieval is performed via an intent gate, source router, and concurrent searches across the three systems, producing integrated, cited answers that exclude fabrication and require evidence the reader has opened. The system achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on LongMemEval (95.60%) and LoCoMo (93.60%) while offering a favorable accuracy‑cost‑latency trade‑off across multiple backbone LLMs.