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.
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