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.
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
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:2601. 09445v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In language models (LMs), intra-memory knowledge conflict arises when inconsistent information about the same subject is encoded within the model's parametric knowledge.
By Minh Vu Pham, Hsuvas Borkakoty, Yufang Hou
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
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:2609.24238v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We reproduce and stress-test the work of Yu et al. (2023), who characterize how language models (LMs) arbitrate between memorized knowledge and contrad...
By Guilhem Fouilh\'e, Nicholas Asher, Philippe Muller
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.
By Pengcheng Huang, Zhenghao Liu, Yukun Yan, Haiyan Zhao, Xiaoyuan Yi, Hao Chen, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun, Tong Xiao, Ge Yu, Chenyan Xiong
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:2508. 01273v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Explicit knowledge conflicts, occurring when retrieved contexts contain contradictory information, pose a fundamental challenge for Large Language Models (LLMs) as they integrate increasingly diverse data sources.
By Xianda Zheng, Zijian Huang, Meng-Fen Chiang, Jiamou Liu, Yuan Fang, Michael Witbrock, Kaiqi Zhao
arXiv:2608. 13484v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When asked about entities outside their knowledge boundary, LLMs routinely fabricate plausible-sounding details rather than backing off to safer, more general claims.
By Dananjay Srinivas, Saksham Khatwani, Maria Pacheco
arXiv:2608. 13921v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents increasingly maintain personal memory across sessions, but it can conflict.
By Lu Yang, Shusheng Xu, Zhuoran Li, Tongkai Yang, Longbo Huang