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
arXiv:2609.26610v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Despite their outstanding performance on many NLP tasks, LLMs face serious challenges related to semantic abstraction. In this study, we are interested...
By David Torres-Moreno, Jorge Hermosillo-Valadez
arXiv:2605. 12213v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: LLM-based conversational AI agents struggle to maintain coherent behavior over long horizons due to limited context.
By Jiazhou Liang, Armin Toroghi, Yifan Simon Liu, Faeze Moradi Kalarde, Liam Gallagher, Scott Sanner
arXiv:2602. 20094v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) witness increasing deployment in complex, high-stakes decision-making scenarios, it becomes imperative to ground their reasoning in causality rather than spurious correlations.
By Yuzhe Wang, Yaochen Zhu, Jundong Li
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
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
The paper introduces AMA, a framework that uses multiple agents—Constructor, Retriever, Judge, and Refresher—to manage memory for large language model agents. AMA’s hierarchical memory design dynamically adjusts retrieval granularity to match task complexity, while the Judge and Refresher ensure relevance, consistency, and timely updates. Experiments on long-context benchmarks show AMA outperforms existing baselines and cuts token usage by about 80% compared to full-context approaches.
By Weiquan Huang, Zixuan Wang, Hehai Lin, Sudong Wang, Bo Xu, Qian Li, Beier Zhu, Linyi Yang, Chengwei Qin
arXiv:2607. 10562v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating the multi-hop reasoning capabilities of large language models remains a significant challenge.
By JungMin Yun, JuneHyoung Kwon, YoungBin Kim
arXiv:2607. 17266v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in natural language processing.
By Peiji Yu, Xin Chen, Tianxing Wu
The paper introduces PACE, a dataset that tests whether personalized assistants can detect hidden conflicts in user requests by integrating implicit, egocentric knowledge from a knowledge base. PACE pairs user requests with persona-specific facts, requiring models to retrieve contextual evidence before deciding if a request is inappropriate. The authors also propose PaceMaker, a multi-agent system that improves conflict detection by coordinating query reformulation, multi-hop graph traversal, and conflict-aware filtering, outperforming existing methods on the PACE benchmark.
By Yoojin Kim, Jihyoung Jang, Hyounghun Kim
arXiv:2604. 27660v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Many real-world tasks require language models (LMs) to reason over complex contexts that exceed their parametric knowledge.
By Shuzheng Si, Haozhe Zhao, Yu Lei, Qingyi Wang, Dingwei Chen, Zhitong Wang, Zhenhailong Wang, Kangyang Luo, Zheng Wang, Gang Chen, Fanchao Qi, Minjia Zhang, Maosong Sun