Daily Papers

In medical multiple-choice question answering (MCQA), Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) can supplement the domain knowledge of language models (LMs). However, since vanilla RAG indiscriminately utilizes retrieved documents, it can degrade LM performance. To address this, we propose MedJudgeRAG. Our framework represents retrieved documents as a dynamic knowledge graph (KG) composed of entities and relations. For each option, the model judges an evidence verdict from the retrieved documents and the KG. Based on the verdict combination, the model determines a knowledge utilization strategy to reason toward the final answer. These capabilities are trained via supervised fine-tuning using structured reasoning traces generated by a teacher LM. The training employs a weighted cross-entropy loss that differentially weights the KG and reasoning segments. Experiments on two medical MCQA benchmarks demonstrate that MedJudgeRAG consistently outperforms both vanilla RAG and parametric baselines. Furthermore, ablation analysis reveals that the dynamic KG is more effective as graph-conditioned supervision at training time than as an explicit output at inference time. Our code is available at https://github.com/hyu-amllab/medjudgerag, and the generated reasoning traces are released at https://huggingface.co/datasets/youarethewon/medjudgerag.

In this paper, a novel Generation-Evaluation framework is developed for multi-turn conversations with the objective of letting both participants know more about each other. For the sake of rational knowledge utilization and coherent conversation flow, a dialogue strategy which controls knowledge selection is instantiated and continuously adapted via reinforcement learning. Under the deployed strategy, knowledge grounded conversations are conducted with two dialogue agents. The generated dialogues are comprehensively evaluated on aspects like informativeness and coherence, which are aligned with our objective and human instinct. These assessments are integrated as a compound reward to guide the evolution of dialogue strategy via policy gradient. Comprehensive experiments have been carried out on the publicly available dataset, demonstrating that the proposed method outperforms the other state-of-the-art approaches significantly.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become the dominant paradigm for endowing language models with advanced reasoning capabilities. Despite the substantial empirical gains demonstrated by RL-based training methods like GRPO, a granular understanding of their advantages is still lacking. To address this gap, we introduce a fine-grained analytic framework to dissect the impact of RL on reasoning. Our framework specifically investigates key elements that have been hypothesized to benefit from RL training: (1) plan-following and execution, (2) problem decomposition, and (3) improved reasoning and knowledge utilization. Using this framework, we gain insights beyond mere accuracy. For instance, providing models with explicit step-by-step plans surprisingly degrades performance on the most challenging benchmarks, yet RL-tuned models exhibit greater robustness, experiencing markedly smaller performance drops than their base counterparts. This suggests that RL may not primarily enhance the execution of external plans but rather empower models to formulate and follow internal strategies better suited to their reasoning processes. Conversely, we observe that RL enhances the model's capacity to integrate provided knowledge into its reasoning process, leading to performance improvements across diverse tasks. We also study difficulty, showing improved training by developing new ways to exploit hard problems. Our findings lay a foundation for more principled training and evaluation of reasoning models.

Business intelligence (BI) transforms large volumes of data within modern organizations into actionable insights for informed decision-making. Recently, large language model (LLM)-based agents have streamlined the BI workflow by automatically performing task planning, reasoning, and actions in executable environments based on natural language (NL) queries. However, existing approaches primarily focus on individual BI tasks such as NL2SQL and NL2VIS. The fragmentation of tasks across different data roles and tools lead to inefficiencies and potential errors due to the iterative and collaborative nature of BI. In this paper, we introduce DataLab, a unified BI platform that integrates a one-stop LLM-based agent framework with an augmented computational notebook interface. DataLab supports a wide range of BI tasks for different data roles by seamlessly combining LLM assistance with user customization within a single environment. To achieve this unification, we design a domain knowledge incorporation module tailored for enterprise-specific BI tasks, an inter-agent communication mechanism to facilitate information sharing across the BI workflow, and a cell-based context management strategy to enhance context utilization efficiency in BI notebooks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DataLab achieves state-of-the-art performance on various BI tasks across popular research benchmarks. Moreover, DataLab maintains high effectiveness and efficiency on real-world datasets from Tencent, achieving up to a 58.58% increase in accuracy and a 61.65% reduction in token cost on enterprise-specific BI tasks.

Modern Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex tasks by employing search-augmented reasoning to incorporate external knowledge into long chains of thought. However, we identify a critical yet underexplored bottleneck in this paradigm, termed Knowledge Integration Decay (KID). Specifically, we observe that as the length of reasoning generated before search grows, models increasingly fail to integrate retrieved evidence into subsequent reasoning steps, limiting performance even when relevant information is available. To address this, we propose Self-Anchored Knowledge Encoding (SAKE), a training-free inference-time strategy designed to stabilize knowledge utilization. By anchoring retrieved knowledge at both the beginning and end of the reasoning process, SAKE prevents it from being overshadowed by prior context, thereby preserving its semantic integrity. Extensive experiments on multi-hop QA and complex reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that SAKE significantly mitigates KID and improves performance, offering a lightweight yet effective solution for knowledge integration in agentic LLMs.

In this paper, we propose an autonomous information seeking visual question answering framework, AVIS. Our method leverages a Large Language Model (LLM) to dynamically strategize the utilization of external tools and to investigate their outputs, thereby acquiring the indispensable knowledge needed to provide answers to the posed questions. Responding to visual questions that necessitate external knowledge, such as "What event is commemorated by the building depicted in this image?", is a complex task. This task presents a combinatorial search space that demands a sequence of actions, including invoking APIs, analyzing their responses, and making informed decisions. We conduct a user study to collect a variety of instances of human decision-making when faced with this task. This data is then used to design a system comprised of three components: an LLM-powered planner that dynamically determines which tool to use next, an LLM-powered reasoner that analyzes and extracts key information from the tool outputs, and a working memory component that retains the acquired information throughout the process. The collected user behavior serves as a guide for our system in two key ways. First, we create a transition graph by analyzing the sequence of decisions made by users. This graph delineates distinct states and confines the set of actions available at each state. Second, we use examples of user decision-making to provide our LLM-powered planner and reasoner with relevant contextual instances, enhancing their capacity to make informed decisions. We show that AVIS achieves state-of-the-art results on knowledge-intensive visual question answering benchmarks such as Infoseek and OK-VQA.

For CLIP-based prompt tuning, introducing more data as additional knowledge for enhancing fine-tuning process is proved to be an effective approach. Existing data amplification strategies for prompt tuning typically rely on external knowledge (e.g., large language models or pre-structured knowledge bases), resulting in higher costs for data collection and processing, while generally ignoring further utilization of features in image modality. To address this, we propose Augmentation-driven Prompt Tuning (AugPT), a self-contained distillation-based prompt tuning approach using only internal augmentation on raw dataset to better exploit known features. Specifically, AugPT employs self-supervised augmentation on unlabeled images in the training set, and introduces a novel gating mechanism based on consensus test, reusing the pre-trained prompt tuning backbone model to spontaneously filter noisy samples, further enhancing the quality of augmented views. Extensive experiments validate that AugPT simultaneously enhances model performance and generalization capability without using appended external knowledge. The code of AugPT is available at: https://github.com/JREion/AugPT .

This paper investigates prior prompt engineering (pPE) in the context of reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT), where language models (LMs) are incentivized to exhibit behaviors that maximize performance through reward signals. While existing RFT research has primarily focused on algorithms, reward shaping, and data curation, the design of the prior prompt--the instructions prepended to queries during training to elicit behaviors such as step-by-step reasoning--remains underexplored. We investigate whether different pPE approaches can guide LMs to internalize distinct behaviors after RFT. Inspired by inference-time prompt engineering (iPE), we translate five representative iPE strategies--reasoning, planning, code-based reasoning, knowledge recall, and null-example utilization--into corresponding pPE approaches. We experiment with Qwen2.5-7B using each of the pPE approaches, then evaluate performance on in-domain and out-of-domain benchmarks (e.g., AIME2024, HumanEval+, and GPQA-Diamond). Our results show that all pPE-trained models surpass their iPE-prompted counterparts, with the null-example pPE approach achieving the largest average performance gain and the highest improvement on AIME2024 and GPQA-Diamond, surpassing the commonly used reasoning approach. Furthermore, by adapting a behavior-classification framework, we demonstrate that different pPE strategies instill distinct behavioral styles in the resulting models. These findings position pPE as a powerful yet understudied axis for RFT.

Understanding knowledge mechanisms in Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial for advancing towards trustworthy AGI. This paper reviews knowledge mechanism analysis from a novel taxonomy including knowledge utilization and evolution. Knowledge utilization delves into the mechanism of memorization, comprehension and application, and creation. Knowledge evolution focuses on the dynamic progression of knowledge within individual and group LLMs. Moreover, we discuss what knowledge LLMs have learned, the reasons for the fragility of parametric knowledge, and the potential dark knowledge (hypothesis) that will be challenging to address. We hope this work can help understand knowledge in LLMs and provide insights for future research.

A research division plays an important role of driving innovation in an organization. Drawing insights, following trends, keeping abreast of new research, and formulating strategies are increasingly becoming more challenging for both researchers and executives as the amount of information grows in both velocity and volume. In this paper we present a use case of how a corporate research community, IBM Research, utilizes Semantic Web technologies to induce a unified Knowledge Graph from both structured and textual data obtained by integrating various applications used by the community related to research projects, academic papers, datasets, achievements and recognition. In order to make the Knowledge Graph more accessible to application developers, we identified a set of common patterns for exploiting the induced knowledge and exposed them as APIs. Those patterns were born out of user research which identified the most valuable use cases or user pain points to be alleviated. We outline two distinct scenarios: recommendation and analytics for business use. We will discuss these scenarios in detail and provide an empirical evaluation on entity recommendation specifically. The methodology used and the lessons learned from this work can be applied to other organizations facing similar challenges.

While pre-trained language models (PLMs) have shown evidence of acquiring vast amounts of knowledge, it remains unclear how much of this parametric knowledge is actually usable in performing downstream tasks. We propose a systematic framework to measure parametric knowledge utilization in PLMs. Our framework first extracts knowledge from a PLM's parameters and subsequently constructs a downstream task around this extracted knowledge. Performance on this task thus depends exclusively on utilizing the model's possessed knowledge, avoiding confounding factors like insufficient signal. As an instantiation, we study factual knowledge of PLMs and measure utilization across 125M to 13B parameter PLMs. We observe that: (1) PLMs exhibit two gaps - in acquired vs. utilized knowledge, (2) they show limited robustness in utilizing knowledge under distribution shifts, and (3) larger models close the acquired knowledge gap but the utilized knowledge gap remains. Overall, our study provides insights into PLMs' capabilities beyond their acquired knowledge.

The exponential growth of scientific literature necessitates advanced tools for effective knowledge exploration. We present Knowledge Navigator, a system designed to enhance exploratory search abilities by organizing and structuring the retrieved documents from broad topical queries into a navigable, two-level hierarchy of named and descriptive scientific topics and subtopics. This structured organization provides an overall view of the research themes in a domain, while also enabling iterative search and deeper knowledge discovery within specific subtopics by allowing users to refine their focus and retrieve additional relevant documents. Knowledge Navigator combines LLM capabilities with cluster-based methods to enable an effective browsing method. We demonstrate our approach's effectiveness through automatic and manual evaluations on two novel benchmarks, CLUSTREC-COVID and SCITOC. Our code, prompts, and benchmarks are made publicly available.

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) have been used to support a wide range of applications, from web search to personal assistant. In this paper, we describe three generations of knowledge graphs: entity-based KGs, which have been supporting general search and question answering (e.g., at Google and Bing); text-rich KGs, which have been supporting search and recommendations for products, bio-informatics, etc. (e.g., at Amazon and Alibaba); and the emerging integration of KGs and LLMs, which we call dual neural KGs. We describe the characteristics of each generation of KGs, the crazy ideas behind the scenes in constructing such KGs, and the techniques developed over time to enable industry impact. In addition, we use KGs as examples to demonstrate a recipe to evolve research ideas from innovations to production practice, and then to the next level of innovations, to advance both science and business.

Knowledge-dependent tasks typically use two sources of knowledge: parametric, learned at training time, and contextual, given as a passage at inference time. To understand how models use these sources together, we formalize the problem of knowledge conflicts, where the contextual information contradicts the learned information. Analyzing the behaviour of popular models, we measure their over-reliance on memorized information (the cause of hallucinations), and uncover important factors that exacerbate this behaviour. Lastly, we propose a simple method to mitigate over-reliance on parametric knowledge, which minimizes hallucination, and improves out-of-distribution generalization by 4%-7%. Our findings demonstrate the importance for practitioners to evaluate model tendency to hallucinate rather than read, and show that our mitigation strategy encourages generalization to evolving information (i.e., time-dependent queries). To encourage these practices, we have released our framework for generating knowledge conflicts.

When learning tasks over time, artificial neural networks suffer from a problem known as Catastrophic Forgetting (CF). This happens when the weights of a network are overwritten during the training of a new task causing forgetting of old information. To address this issue, we propose MetA Reusable Knowledge or MARK, a new method that fosters weight reusability instead of overwriting when learning a new task. Specifically, MARK keeps a set of shared weights among tasks. We envision these shared weights as a common Knowledge Base (KB) that is not only used to learn new tasks, but also enriched with new knowledge as the model learns new tasks. Key components behind MARK are two-fold. On the one hand, a metalearning approach provides the key mechanism to incrementally enrich the KB with new knowledge and to foster weight reusability among tasks. On the other hand, a set of trainable masks provides the key mechanism to selectively choose from the KB relevant weights to solve each task. By using MARK, we achieve state of the art results in several popular benchmarks, surpassing the best performing methods in terms of average accuracy by over 10% on the 20-Split-MiniImageNet dataset, while achieving almost zero forgetfulness using 55% of the number of parameters. Furthermore, an ablation study provides evidence that, indeed, MARK is learning reusable knowledge that is selectively used by each task.

Conversational agents are increasingly deployed in knowledge-intensive settings, where correct behavior depends on retrieving and applying domain-specific knowledge from large, proprietary, and unstructured corpora during live interactions with users. Yet most existing benchmarks evaluate retrieval or tool use independently of each other, creating a gap in realistic, fully agentic evaluation over unstructured data in long-horizon interactions. We introduce τ-Knowledge, an extension of τ-Bench for evaluating agents in environments where success depends on coordinating external, natural-language knowledge with tool outputs to produce verifiable, policy-compliant state changes. Our new domain, τ-Banking, models realistic fintech customer support workflows in which agents must navigate roughly 700 interconnected knowledge documents while executing tool-mediated account updates. Across embedding-based retrieval and terminal-based search, even frontier models with high reasoning budgets achieve only sim25.5% pass^1, with reliability degrading sharply over repeated trials. Agents struggle to retrieve the correct documents from densely interlinked knowledge bases and to reason accurately over complex internal policies. Overall, τ-Knowledge provides a realistic testbed for developing agents that integrate unstructured knowledge in human-facing deployments.

By integrating external knowledge, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become an effective strategy for mitigating the hallucination problems that large language models (LLMs) encounter when dealing with knowledge-intensive tasks. However, in the process of integrating external non-parametric supporting evidence with internal parametric knowledge, inevitable knowledge conflicts may arise, leading to confusion in the model's responses. To enhance the knowledge selection of LLMs in various contexts, some research has focused on refining their behavior patterns through instruction-tuning. Nonetheless, due to the absence of explicit negative signals and comparative objectives, models fine-tuned in this manner may still exhibit undesirable behaviors such as contextual ignorance and contextual overinclusion. To this end, we propose a Knowledge-aware Preference Optimization strategy, dubbed KnowPO, aimed at achieving adaptive knowledge selection based on contextual relevance in real retrieval scenarios. Concretely, we proposed a general paradigm for constructing knowledge conflict datasets, which comprehensively cover various error types and learn how to avoid these negative signals through preference optimization methods. Simultaneously, we proposed a rewriting strategy and data ratio optimization strategy to address preference imbalances. Experimental results show that KnowPO outperforms previous methods for handling knowledge conflicts by over 37\%, while also exhibiting robust generalization across various out-of-distribution datasets.

Despite notable advancements in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems that expand large language model (LLM) capabilities through external retrieval, these systems often struggle to meet the complex and diverse needs of real-world industrial applications. The reliance on retrieval alone proves insufficient for extracting deep, domain-specific knowledge performing in logical reasoning from specialized corpora. To address this, we introduce sPecIalized KnowledgE and Rationale Augmentation Generation (PIKE-RAG), focusing on extracting, understanding, and applying specialized knowledge, while constructing coherent rationale to incrementally steer LLMs toward accurate responses. Recognizing the diverse challenges of industrial tasks, we introduce a new paradigm that classifies tasks based on their complexity in knowledge extraction and application, allowing for a systematic evaluation of RAG systems' problem-solving capabilities. This strategic approach offers a roadmap for the phased development and enhancement of RAG systems, tailored to meet the evolving demands of industrial applications. Furthermore, we propose knowledge atomizing and knowledge-aware task decomposition to effectively extract multifaceted knowledge from the data chunks and iteratively construct the rationale based on original query and the accumulated knowledge, respectively, showcasing exceptional performance across various benchmarks.

Knowledge is fundamental to the overall capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). The knowledge paradigm of a model, which dictates how it encodes and utilizes knowledge, significantly affects its performance. Despite the continuous development of LLMs under existing knowledge paradigms, issues within these frameworks continue to constrain model potential. This blog post highlight three critical open problems limiting model capabilities: (1) challenges in knowledge updating for LLMs, (2) the failure of reverse knowledge generalization (the reversal curse), and (3) conflicts in internal knowledge. We review recent progress made in addressing these issues and discuss potential general solutions. Based on observations in these areas, we propose a hypothetical paradigm based on Contextual Knowledge Scaling, and further outline implementation pathways that remain feasible within contemporary techniques. Evidence suggests this approach holds potential to address current shortcomings, serving as our vision for future model paradigms. This blog post aims to provide researchers with a brief overview of progress in LLM knowledge systems, while provide inspiration for the development of next-generation model architectures.

The proposed research aims to develop an innovative semantic query processing system that enables users to obtain comprehensive information about research works produced by Computer Science (CS) researchers at the Australian National University (ANU). The system integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) with the ANU Scholarly Knowledge Graph (ASKG), a structured repository of all research-related artifacts produced at ANU in the CS field. Each artifact and its parts are represented as textual nodes stored in a Knowledge Graph (KG). To address the limitations of traditional scholarly KG construction and utilization methods, which often fail to capture fine-grained details, we propose a novel framework that integrates the Deep Document Model (DDM) for comprehensive document representation and the KG-enhanced Query Processing (KGQP) for optimized complex query handling. DDM enables a fine-grained representation of the hierarchical structure and semantic relationships within academic papers, while KGQP leverages the KG structure to improve query accuracy and efficiency with LLMs. By combining the ASKG with LLMs, our approach enhances knowledge utilization and natural language understanding capabilities. The proposed system employs an automatic LLM-SPARQL fusion to retrieve relevant facts and textual nodes from the ASKG. Initial experiments demonstrate that our framework is superior to baseline methods in terms of accuracy retrieval and query efficiency. We showcase the practical application of our framework in academic research scenarios, highlighting its potential to revolutionize scholarly knowledge management and discovery. This work empowers researchers to acquire and utilize knowledge from documents more effectively and provides a foundation for developing precise and reliable interactions with LLMs.

Knowledge plays a critical role in artificial intelligence. Recently, the extensive success of pre-trained language models (PLMs) has raised significant attention about how knowledge can be acquired, maintained, updated and used by language models. Despite the enormous amount of related studies, there still lacks a unified view of how knowledge circulates within language models throughout the learning, tuning, and application processes, which may prevent us from further understanding the connections between current progress or realizing existing limitations. In this survey, we revisit PLMs as knowledge-based systems by dividing the life circle of knowledge in PLMs into five critical periods, and investigating how knowledge circulates when it is built, maintained and used. To this end, we systematically review existing studies of each period of the knowledge life cycle, summarize the main challenges and current limitations, and discuss future directions.

Scientific innovation is pivotal for humanity, and harnessing large language models (LLMs) to generate research ideas could transform discovery. However, existing LLMs often produce simplistic and repetitive suggestions due to their limited ability in acquiring external knowledge for innovation. To address this problem, we introduce an enhanced planning and search methodology designed to boost the creative potential of LLM-based systems. Our approach involves an iterative process to purposely plan the retrieval of external knowledge, progressively enriching the idea generation with broader and deeper insights. Validation through automated and human assessments indicates that our framework substantially elevates the quality of generated ideas, particularly in novelty and diversity. The number of unique novel ideas produced by our framework is 3.4 times higher than without it. Moreover, our method outperforms the current state-of-the-art, generating at least 2.5 times more top-rated ideas based on 170 seed papers in a Swiss Tournament evaluation.

While prompt optimization has emerged as a critical technique for enhancing language model performance, existing approaches primarily focus on elicitation-based strategies that search for optimal prompts to activate models' capabilities. These methods exhibit fundamental limitations when addressing knowledge-intensive tasks, as they operate within static knowledge capacity rather than providing the factual knowledge, terminology precision, and reasoning patterns required in specialized domains. To address these limitations, we propose Knowledge-Provision-based Prompt Optimization (KPPO), a framework that reformulates prompt optimization as systematic knowledge integration rather than potential elicitation. KPPO introduces three key innovations: 1) a knowledge gap filling mechanism for knowledge gap identification and targeted remediation; 2) a batch-wise candidate evaluation approach that considers both performance improvement and distributional stability; 3) an adaptive knowledge pruning strategy that balances performance and token efficiency, reducing up to 29% of inference token usage. Evaluation on 15 knowledge-intensive benchmarks from various domains demonstrates KPPO's superiority over elicitation-based methods, with an average improvement of ~6% over baselines while achieving comparable or lower token consumption.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems combine Large Language Models (LLMs) with external knowledge, and their performance depends heavily on how that knowledge is represented. This study investigates how different Knowledge Graph (KG) construction strategies influence RAG performance. We compare a variety of approaches: standard vector-based RAG, GraphRAG, and retrieval over KGs built from ontologies derived either from relational databases or textual corpora. Results show that ontology-guided KGs incorporating chunk information achieve competitive performance with state-of-the-art frameworks, substantially outperforming vector retrieval baselines. Moreover, the findings reveal that ontology-guided KGs built from relational databases perform competitively to ones built with ontologies extracted from text, with the benefit of offering a dual advantage: they require a one-time-only ontology learning process, substantially reducing LLM usage costs; and avoid the complexity of ontology merging inherent to text-based approaches.

For decades, data engineering has developed mature architectural principles for integrating, governing, validating, cataloging, and serving organizational data. The rise of large language models does not eliminate these concerns; it exposes a broader version of them. Organizational knowledge is becoming executable infrastructure: systems increasingly retrieve it, assemble it, reason over it, and act on it. This paper argues that enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) systems suggest a transition toward an architectural discipline for representing, maintaining, governing, and operationally delivering organizational knowledge. We refer to this discipline as knowledge architecture. We offer a conceptual model and taxonomy showing how classical data-engineering guarantees must be redefined when the managed unit shifts from records to knowledge artifacts: extract, transform, and load (ETL) becomes knowledge ingestion, change-data capture (CDC) becomes knowledge change detection, lineage becomes provenance, catalogs become knowledge catalogs, materialized views become knowledge views, and medallion architectures become raw--curated--operational knowledge layers. Emerging formats such as large language model (LLM) Wiki and the Open Knowledge Format (OKF) are treated as early evidence of this transition, not as its endpoint. The central claim is that knowledge architecture becomes useful when organizational knowledge ceases to be a passive information resource and becomes an operational asset used by humans, agents, workflows, and models to execute work.

We introduce a new problem KTRL+F, a knowledge-augmented in-document search task that necessitates real-time identification of all semantic targets within a document with the awareness of external sources through a single natural query. This task addresses following unique challenges for in-document search: 1) utilizing knowledge outside the document for extended use of additional information about targets to bridge the semantic gap between the query and the targets, and 2) balancing between real-time applicability with the performance. We analyze various baselines in KTRL+F and find there are limitations of existing models, such as hallucinations, low latency, or difficulties in leveraging external knowledge. Therefore we propose a Knowledge-Augmented Phrase Retrieval model that shows a promising balance between speed and performance by simply augmenting external knowledge embedding in phrase embedding. Additionally, we conduct a user study to verify whether solving KTRL+F can enhance search experience of users. It demonstrates that even with our simple model users can reduce the time for searching with less queries and reduced extra visits to other sources for collecting evidence. We encourage the research community to work on KTRL+F to enhance more efficient in-document information access.

Although large-scale pre-trained language models (PTLMs) are shown to encode rich knowledge in their model parameters, the inherent knowledge in PTLMs can be opaque or static, making external knowledge necessary. However, the existing information retrieval techniques could be costly and may even introduce noisy and sometimes misleading knowledge. To address these challenges, we propose the instance-level adaptive propulsion of external knowledge (IAPEK), where we only conduct the retrieval when necessary. To achieve this goal, we propose measuring whether a PTLM contains enough knowledge to solve an instance with a novel metric, Thrust, which leverages the representation distribution of a small number of seen instances. Extensive experiments demonstrate that thrust is a good measurement of PTLM models' instance-level knowledgeability. Moreover, we can achieve significantly higher cost-efficiency with the Thrust score as the retrieval indicator than the naive usage of external knowledge on 88% of the evaluated tasks with 26% average performance improvement. Such findings shed light on the real-world practice of knowledge-enhanced LMs with a limited knowledge-seeking budget due to computation latency or costs.

Given the exceptional performance of proprietary large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4, recent research has increasingly focused on boosting the capabilities of smaller models through knowledge distillation (KD) from these powerful yet black-box teachers. While leveraging the high-quality outputs of these teachers is advantageous, the inaccessibility of their internal states often limits effective knowledge transfer. To overcome this limitation, we introduce Proxy-KD, a novel method that uses a proxy model to facilitate the efficient transfer of knowledge from black-box LLMs to smaller models. Our experiments show that Proxy-KD not only enhances the performance of KD from black-box teacher models but also surpasses traditional white-box KD techniques.~This approach presents a compelling new avenue for distilling knowledge from advanced LLMs.

Knowledge-grounded dialogue is a task of generating an informative response based on both the dialogue history and external knowledge source. In general, there are two forms of knowledge: manually annotated knowledge graphs and knowledge text from website. From various evaluation viewpoints, each type of knowledge has advantages and downsides. To further distinguish the principles and determinants from the intricate factors, we conduct a thorough experiment and study on the task to answer three essential questions. The questions involve the choice of appropriate knowledge form, the degree of mutual effects between knowledge and the model selection, and the few-shot performance of knowledge. Supported by statistical shreds of evidence, we offer conclusive solutions and sensible suggestions for directions and standards of future research.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted for knowledge-intensive tasks and contexts. Existing approaches improve the knowledge capabilities of general-purpose LLMs through retrieval or generated knowledge prompting, but they fall short of reflecting two key properties of knowledge-rich models: knowledge should be modular, ever-growing, sourced from diverse domains; knowledge acquisition and production should be a collaborative process, where diverse stakeholders contribute new information. To this end, we propose CooK, a novel framework to empower general-purpose large language models with modular and collaboratively sourced knowledge. We first introduce specialized language models, autoregressive models trained on corpora from a wide range of domains and sources. These specialized LMs serve as parametric knowledge repositories that are later prompted to generate background knowledge for general-purpose LLMs. We then propose three knowledge filters to dynamically select and retain information in generated documents by controlling for relevance, brevity, and factuality. Finally, we propose bottom-up and top-down knowledge integration approaches to augment general-purpose LLMs with the curated (relevant, factual) knowledge from community-driven specialized LMs that enable multi-domain knowledge synthesis and on-demand knowledge requests. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that CooK achieves state-of-the-art performance on six benchmark datasets. Our results highlight the potential of enriching general-purpose LLMs with evolving and modular knowledge -- relevant knowledge that can be continuously updated through the collective efforts of the research community.

In open-domain dialogue intelligent agents should exhibit the use of knowledge, however there are few convincing demonstrations of this to date. The most popular sequence to sequence models typically "generate and hope" generic utterances that can be memorized in the weights of the model when mapping from input utterance(s) to output, rather than employing recalled knowledge as context. Use of knowledge has so far proved difficult, in part because of the lack of a supervised learning benchmark task which exhibits knowledgeable open dialogue with clear grounding. To that end we collect and release a large dataset with conversations directly grounded with knowledge retrieved from Wikipedia. We then design architectures capable of retrieving knowledge, reading and conditioning on it, and finally generating natural responses. Our best performing dialogue models are able to conduct knowledgeable discussions on open-domain topics as evaluated by automatic metrics and human evaluations, while our new benchmark allows for measuring further improvements in this important research direction.

Adapting general large language models (LLMs) to specialized domains presents great challenges due to varied data distributions. This adaptation typically requires continual pre-training on massive domain-specific corpora to facilitate knowledge memorization, followed by training to apply this knowledge following human instructions and preferences. However, this method may result in inefficient knowledge memorization due to a lack of awareness of knowledge utilization and imposes substantial demands on LLMs to simultaneously learn knowledge utilization and format alignment with limited training samples. To facilitate the domain adaptation of LLM, we revise this process and propose a new domain adaptation framework including domain knowledge learning and general format alignment, called Mix-CPT. Specifically, we first conduct a knowledge mixture continual pre-training that concurrently focuses on knowledge memorization and utilization, allowing for mutual reinforcement. To avoid catastrophic forgetting during the continual pre-training process, we further incorporate a logit swap self-distillation constraint. Subsequently, leveraging the knowledge and capabilities acquired during continual pre-training, we efficiently perform instruction tuning and alignment with a few general training samples to achieve format alignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed Mix-CPT framework can simultaneously improve the task-solving capabilities of LLMs on the target and general domains compared to the traditional adaptation methods.

The goal of text generation is to make machines express in human language. It is one of the most important yet challenging tasks in natural language processing (NLP). Since 2014, various neural encoder-decoder models pioneered by Seq2Seq have been proposed to achieve the goal by learning to map input text to output text. However, the input text alone often provides limited knowledge to generate the desired output, so the performance of text generation is still far from satisfaction in many real-world scenarios. To address this issue, researchers have considered incorporating various forms of knowledge beyond the input text into the generation models. This research direction is known as knowledge-enhanced text generation. In this survey, we present a comprehensive review of the research on knowledge enhanced text generation over the past five years. The main content includes two parts: (i) general methods and architectures for integrating knowledge into text generation; (ii) specific techniques and applications according to different forms of knowledge data. This survey can have broad audiences, researchers and practitioners, in academia and industry.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods can enhance the performance of LLMs by incorporating retrieved knowledge chunks into the generation process. In general, the retrieval and generation steps usually have different requirements for these knowledge chunks. The retrieval step benefits from comprehensive information to improve retrieval accuracy, whereas excessively long chunks may introduce redundant contextual information, thereby diminishing both the effectiveness and efficiency of the generation process. However, existing RAG methods typically employ identical representations of knowledge chunks for both retrieval and generation, resulting in suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose a heterogeneous RAG framework (\myname) that decouples the representations of knowledge chunks for retrieval and generation, thereby enhancing the LLMs in both effectiveness and efficiency. Specifically, we utilize short chunks to represent knowledge to adapt the generation step and utilize the corresponding chunk with its contextual information from multi-granular views to enhance retrieval accuracy. We further introduce an adaptive prompt tuning method for the retrieval model to adapt the heterogeneous retrieval augmented generation process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that \myname achieves significant improvements compared to baselines.

Knowledge distillation (KD) is a popular method of transferring knowledge from a large "teacher" model to a small "student" model. KD can be divided into two categories: prediction matching and intermediate-layer matching. We explore an intriguing phenomenon: layer-selection strategy does not matter (much) in intermediate-layer matching. In this paper, we show that seemingly nonsensical matching strategies such as matching the teacher's layers in reverse still result in surprisingly good student performance. We provide an interpretation for this phenomenon by examining the angles between teacher layers viewed from the student's perspective.

Language models are powerful tools, yet their factual knowledge is still poorly understood, and inaccessible to ad-hoc browsing and scalable statistical analysis. This demonstration introduces GPTKB v1.5, a densely interlinked 100-million-triple knowledge base (KB) built for $14,000 from GPT-4.1, using the GPTKB methodology for massive-recursive LLM knowledge materialization (Hu et al., ACL 2025). The demonstration experience focuses on three use cases: (1) link-traversal-based LLM knowledge exploration, (2) SPARQL-based structured LLM knowledge querying, (3) comparative exploration of the strengths and weaknesses of LLM knowledge. Massive-recursive LLM knowledge materialization is a groundbreaking opportunity both for the research area of systematic analysis of LLM knowledge, as well as for automated KB construction. The GPTKB demonstrator is accessible at https://gptkb.org.

To handle the vast amounts of qualitative data produced in corporate climate communication, stakeholders increasingly rely on Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. However, a significant gap remains in evaluating domain-specific information retrieval - the basis for answer generation. To address this challenge, this work simulates the typical tasks of a sustainability analyst by examining 30 sustainability reports with 16 detailed climate-related questions. As a result, we obtain a dataset with over 8.5K unique question-source-answer pairs labeled by different levels of relevance. Furthermore, we develop a use case with the dataset to investigate the integration of expert knowledge into information retrieval with embeddings. Although we show that incorporating expert knowledge works, we also outline the critical limitations of embeddings in knowledge-intensive downstream domains like climate change communication.

In this paper, we propose a novel LLM-Neo framework that efficiently transfers knowledge from a large language model (LLM) teacher to a compact student. Initially, we revisit the knowledge distillation (KD) and low-rank adaption (LoRA), and argue that they share the same paradigm. Inspired by this observation, we explore the strategy that combines LoRA and KD to enhance the efficiency of knowledge transfer. We first summarize some guidelines for this design and further develop the LLM-Neo. Experimental results on compressing Llama 2 and Llama 3 show that LLM-Neo outperforms various baselines. Further analysis demonstrates the robustness of the proposed LLM-Neo on variants of LoRA. The trained models have been available at https://huggingface.co/collections/yang31210999/llm-neo-66e3c882f5579b829ff57eba{this repository}.

Over the years, various approaches have been employed to enhance the productivity of knowledge workers, from addressing psychological well-being to the development of personal knowledge assistants. A significant challenge in this research area has been the absence of a comprehensive, publicly accessible dataset that mirrors real-world knowledge work. Although a handful of datasets exist, many are restricted in access or lack vital information dimensions, complicating meaningful comparison and benchmarking in the domain. This paper presents RLKWiC, a novel dataset of Real-Life Knowledge Work in Context, derived from monitoring the computer interactions of eight participants over a span of two months. As the first publicly available dataset offering a wealth of essential information dimensions (such as explicated contexts, textual contents, and semantics), RLKWiC seeks to address the research gap in the personal information management domain, providing valuable insights for modeling user behavior.

Retrieval-augmented language models often struggle with knowledge-intensive tasks due to inefficient retrieval, unstructured knowledge integration, and single-pass architectures. We present Retrieval-And-Structuring (RAS), a novel framework that dynamically constructs and reasons over query-specific knowledge graphs through iterative retrieval and structuring. RAS introduces four key technical innovations: (1) a themescoped retrieval mechanism that efficiently narrows the search space while maintaining retrieval quality, (2) an action planning module that determines knowledge needs and generates focused sub-queries, (3) a dynamic knowledge structuring approach that converts retrieved text into an evolving knowledge graph, and (4) a graph-augmented answering component that leverages the accumulated structured information. Our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance, surpassing leading baselines by 6.4% with open-source language models and 7.0% with proprietary models on seven knowledge-intensive generation datasets across all evaluation metrics. Detailed ablation studies verify the contribution of each technical component to the overall system performance.

In large organisations, identifying experts on a given topic is crucial in leveraging the internal knowledge spread across teams and departments. So-called enterprise expert retrieval systems automatically discover and structure employees' expertise based on the vast amount of heterogeneous data available about them and the work they perform. Evaluating these systems requires comprehensive ground truth expert annotations, which are hard to obtain. Therefore, the annotation process typically relies on automated recommendations of knowledge areas to validate. This case study provides an analysis of how these recommendations can impact the evaluation of expert finding systems. We demonstrate on a popular benchmark that system-validated annotations lead to overestimated performance of traditional term-based retrieval models and even invalidate comparisons with more recent neural methods. We also augment knowledge areas with synonyms to uncover a strong bias towards literal mentions of their constituent words. Finally, we propose constraints to the annotation process to prevent these biased evaluations, and show that this still allows annotation suggestions of high utility. These findings should inform benchmark creation or selection for expert finding, to guarantee meaningful comparison of methods.

Injecting external knowledge can improve the performance of pre-trained language models (PLMs) on various downstream NLP tasks. However, massive retraining is required to deploy new knowledge injection methods or knowledge bases for downstream tasks. In this work, we are the first to study how to improve the flexibility and efficiency of knowledge injection by reusing existing downstream models. To this end, we explore a new paradigm plug-and-play knowledge injection, where knowledge bases are injected into frozen existing downstream models by a knowledge plugin. Correspondingly, we propose a plug-and-play injection method map-tuning, which trains a mapping of knowledge embeddings to enrich model inputs with mapped embeddings while keeping model parameters frozen. Experimental results on three knowledge-driven NLP tasks show that existing injection methods are not suitable for the new paradigm, while map-tuning effectively improves the performance of downstream models. Moreover, we show that a frozen downstream model can be well adapted to different domains with different mapping networks of domain knowledge. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/THUNLP/Knowledge-Plugin.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) improves factual accuracy by grounding responses in external knowledge. However, existing methods typically rely on a single source, either unstructured text or structured knowledge. Moreover, they lack cognitively inspired mechanisms for activating relevant knowledge. To address these issues, we propose KG-Infused RAG, a framework that integrates KGs into RAG systems to implement spreading activation, a cognitive process that enables concept association and inference. KG-Infused RAG retrieves KG facts, expands the query accordingly, and enhances generation by combining corpus passages with structured facts, enabling interpretable, multi-source retrieval grounded in semantic structure. We further improve KG-Infused RAG via preference learning on sampled key stages in the pipeline. Experiments on five QA benchmarks show that KG-Infused RAG consistently outperforms vanilla RAG (by 3.8% to 13.8%). Additionally, when integrated into Self-RAG, KG-Infused RAG brings further performance gains, demonstrating its effectiveness and versatility as a plug-and-play enhancement module for corpus-based RAG methods.

Knowledge-grounded conversation (KGC) shows great potential in building an engaging and knowledgeable chatbot, and knowledge selection is a key ingredient in it. However, previous methods for knowledge selection only concentrate on the relevance between knowledge and dialogue context, ignoring the fact that age, hobby, education and life experience of an interlocutor have a major effect on his or her personal preference over external knowledge. Without taking the personalization issue into account, it is difficult to select the proper knowledge and generate persona-consistent responses. In this work, we introduce personal memory into knowledge selection in KGC to address the personalization issue. We propose a variational method to model the underlying relationship between one's personal memory and his or her selection of knowledge, and devise a learning scheme in which the forward mapping from personal memory to knowledge and its inverse mapping is included in a closed loop so that they could teach each other. Experiment results show that our method outperforms existing KGC methods significantly on both automatic evaluation and human evaluation.

Large language models (LLMs) are primarily evaluated by overall performance on various text understanding and generation tasks. However, such a paradigm fails to comprehensively differentiate the fine-grained language and cognitive skills, rendering the lack of sufficient interpretation to LLMs' capabilities. In this paper, we present FAC^2E, a framework for Fine-grAined and Cognition-grounded LLMs' Capability Evaluation. Specifically, we formulate LLMs' evaluation in a multi-dimensional and explainable manner by dissociating the language-related capabilities and the cognition-related ones. Besides, through extracting the intermediate reasoning from LLMs, we further break down the process of applying a specific capability into three sub-steps: recalling relevant knowledge, utilizing knowledge, and solving problems. Finally, FAC^2E evaluates each sub-step of each fine-grained capability, providing a two-faceted diagnosis for LLMs. Utilizing FAC^2E, we identify a common shortfall in knowledge utilization among models and propose a straightforward, knowledge-enhanced method to mitigate this issue. Our results not only showcase promising performance enhancements but also highlight a direction for future LLM advancements.

ExpertRAG is a novel theoretical framework that integrates Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to advance the efficiency and accuracy of knowledge-intensive language modeling. We propose a dynamic retrieval gating mechanism coupled with expert routing, enabling the model to selectively consult an external knowledge store or rely on specialized internal experts based on the query's needs. The paper lays out the theoretical foundations of ExpertRAG, including a probabilistic formulation that treats retrieval and expert selection as latent decisions, and mathematical justifications for its efficiency in both computation and knowledge utilization. We derive formulae to quantify the expected computational cost savings from selective retrieval and the capacity gains from sparse expert utilization. A comparative analysis positions ExpertRAG against standard RAG (with always-on retrieval) and pure MoE models (e.g., Switch Transformer, Mixtral) to highlight its unique balance between parametric knowledge and non-parametric retrieval. We also outline an experimental validation strategy, proposing benchmarks and evaluation protocols to test ExpertRAG's performance on factual recall, generalization, and inference efficiency. The proposed framework, although presented theoretically, is supported by insights from prior work in RAG and MoE, and is poised to provide more factual, efficient, and adaptive generation by leveraging the best of both paradigms. In summary, ExpertRAG contributes a new perspective on scaling and augmenting language models, backed by a thorough analysis and a roadmap for empirical validation.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) acquire vast knowledge during pre-training, they often lack domain-specific, new, or niche information. Continual pre-training (CPT) attempts to address this gap but suffers from catastrophic forgetting and inefficiencies in low-data regimes. We introduce Knowledge-Instruct, a novel approach to efficiently inject knowledge from limited corpora through pure instruction-tuning. By generating information-dense synthetic instruction data, it effectively integrates new knowledge while preserving general reasoning and instruction-following abilities. Knowledge-Instruct demonstrates superior factual memorization, minimizes catastrophic forgetting, and remains scalable by leveraging synthetic data from relatively small language models. Additionally, it enhances contextual understanding, including complex multi-hop reasoning, facilitating integration with retrieval systems. We validate its effectiveness across diverse benchmarks, including Companies, a new dataset that we release to measure knowledge injection capabilities.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) significantly improved the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to solve knowledge-intensive tasks. While existing research seeks to enhance RAG performance by retrieving higher-quality documents or designing RAG-specific LLMs, the internal mechanisms within LLMs that contribute to the effectiveness of RAG systems remain underexplored. In this paper, we aim to investigate these internal mechanisms within the popular Mixture-of-Expert (MoE)-based LLMs and demonstrate how to improve RAG by examining expert activations in these LLMs. Our controlled experiments reveal that several core groups of experts are primarily responsible for RAG-related behaviors. The activation of these core experts can signify the model's inclination towards external/internal knowledge and adjust its behavior. For instance, we identify core experts that can (1) indicate the sufficiency of the model's internal knowledge, (2) assess the quality of retrieved documents, and (3) enhance the model's ability to utilize context. Based on these findings, we propose several strategies to enhance RAG's efficiency and effectiveness through expert activation. Experimental results across various datasets and MoE-based LLMs show the effectiveness of our method.

Pre-trained language models (PLM) have advanced the state-of-the-art across NLP applications, but lack domain-specific knowledge that does not naturally occur in pre-training data. Previous studies augmented PLMs with symbolic knowledge for different downstream NLP tasks. However, knowledge bases (KBs) utilized in these studies are usually large-scale and static, in contrast to small, domain-specific, and modifiable knowledge bases that are prominent in real-world task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems. In this paper, we showcase the advantages of injecting domain-specific knowledge prior to fine-tuning on TOD tasks. To this end, we utilize light-weight adapters that can be easily integrated with PLMs and serve as a repository for facts learned from different KBs. To measure the efficacy of proposed knowledge injection methods, we introduce Knowledge Probing using Response Selection (KPRS) -- a probe designed specifically for TOD models. Experiments on KPRS and the response generation task show improvements of knowledge injection with adapters over strong baselines.

The recently developed retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) technology has enabled the efficient construction of domain-specific applications. However, it also has limitations, including the gap between vector similarity and the relevance of knowledge reasoning, as well as insensitivity to knowledge logic, such as numerical values, temporal relations, expert rules, and others, which hinder the effectiveness of professional knowledge services. In this work, we introduce a professional domain knowledge service framework called Knowledge Augmented Generation (KAG). KAG is designed to address the aforementioned challenges with the motivation of making full use of the advantages of knowledge graph(KG) and vector retrieval, and to improve generation and reasoning performance by bidirectionally enhancing large language models (LLMs) and KGs through five key aspects: (1) LLM-friendly knowledge representation, (2) mutual-indexing between knowledge graphs and original chunks, (3) logical-form-guided hybrid reasoning engine, (4) knowledge alignment with semantic reasoning, and (5) model capability enhancement for KAG. We compared KAG with existing RAG methods in multihop question answering and found that it significantly outperforms state-of-theart methods, achieving a relative improvement of 19.6% on 2wiki and 33.5% on hotpotQA in terms of F1 score. We have successfully applied KAG to two professional knowledge Q&A tasks of Ant Group, including E-Government Q&A and E-Health Q&A, achieving significant improvement in professionalism compared to RAG methods.

Scientific progress depends on the continual generation of innovative re-search ideas. However, the rapid growth of scientific literature has greatly increased the cost of knowledge filtering, making it harder for researchers to identify novel directions. Although existing large language model (LLM)-based methods show promise in research idea generation, the ideas they produce are often repetitive and lack depth. To address this issue, this study proposes a multi-agent iterative planning search strategy inspired by com-binatorial innovation theory. The framework combines iterative knowledge search with an LLM-based multi-agent system to generate, evaluate, and re-fine research ideas through repeated interaction, with the goal of improving idea diversity and novelty. Experiments in the natural language processing domain show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art base-lines in both diversity and novelty. Further comparison with ideas derived from top-tier machine learning conference papers indicates that the quality of the generated ideas falls between that of accepted and rejected papers. These results suggest that the proposed framework is a promising approach for supporting high-quality research idea generation. The source code and dataset used in this paper are publicly available on Github repository: https://github.com/ChenShuai00/MAGenIdeas. The demo is available at https://huggingface.co/spaces/cshuai20/MAGenIdeas.

For centuries, researchers have sought out ways to connect disparate areas of knowledge. While early scholars (Galileo, da Vinci, etc.) were experts across fields, specialization has taken hold later. With the advent of Artificial Intelligence, we can now explore relationships across areas (e.g., mechanics-biology) or disparate domains (e.g., failure mechanics-art). To achieve this, we use a fine-tuned Large Language Model (LLM), here for a subset of knowledge in multiscale materials failure. The approach includes the use of a general-purpose LLM to distill question-answer pairs from raw sources followed by LLM fine-tuning. The resulting MechGPT LLM foundation model is used in a series of computational experiments to explore its capacity for knowledge retrieval, various language tasks, hypothesis generation, and connecting knowledge across disparate areas. While the model has some ability to recall knowledge from training, we find that LLMs are particularly useful to extract structural insights through Ontological Knowledge Graphs. These interpretable graph structures provide explanatory insights, frameworks for new research questions, and visual representations of knowledge that also can be used in retrieval-augmented generation. Three versions of MechGPT are discussed, featuring different sizes from 13 billion to 70 billion parameters, and reaching context lengths of more than 10,000 tokens. This provides ample capacity for sophisticated retrieval augmented strategies, as well as agent-based modeling where multiple LLMs interact collaboratively and/or adversarially, the incorporation of new data from the literature or web searches, as well as multimodality.

Knowing that the generative capabilities of large language models (LLM) are sometimes hampered by tendencies to hallucinate or create non-factual responses, researchers have increasingly focused on methods to ground generated outputs in factual data. Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a key approach for integrating knowledge from data sources outside of the LLM's training set, including proprietary and up-to-date information. While many research papers explore various RAG strategies, their true efficacy is tested in real-world applications with actual data. The journey from conceiving an idea to actualizing it in the real world is a lengthy process. We present insights from the development and field-testing of a pilot project that integrates LLMs with RAG for information retrieval. Additionally, we examine the impacts on the information value chain, encompassing people, processes, and technology. Our aim is to identify the opportunities and challenges of implementing this emerging technology, particularly within the context of behavioral research in the information systems (IS) field. The contributions of this work include the development of best practices and recommendations for adopting this promising technology while ensuring compliance with industry regulations through a proposed AI governance model.

Despite many advances in knowledge engineering (KE), challenges remain in areas such as engineering knowledge graphs (KGs) at scale, keeping up with evolving domain knowledge, multilingualism, and multimodality. Recently, KE has used LLMs to support semi-automatic tasks, but the most effective use of LLMs to support knowledge engineers across the KE activites is still in its infancy. To explore the vision of LLM copilots for KE and change existing KE practices, we conducted a multimethod study during a KE hackathon. We investigated participants' views on the use of LLMs, the challenges they face, the skills they may need to integrate LLMs into their practices, and how they use LLMs responsibly. We found participants felt LLMs could contribute to improving efficiency when engineering KGs, but presented increased challenges around the already complex issues of evaluating the KE tasks. We discovered prompting to be a useful but undervalued skill for knowledge engineers working with LLMs, and note that natural language processing skills may become more relevant across more roles in KG construction. Integrating LLMs into KE tasks needs to be mindful of potential risks and harms related to responsible AI. Given the limited ethical training, most knowledge engineers receive solutions such as our suggested `KG cards' based on data cards could be a useful guide for KG construction. Our findings can support designers of KE AI copilots, KE researchers, and practitioners using advanced AI to develop trustworthy applications, propose new methodologies for KE and operate new technologies responsibly.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) significantly enhances the performance of large language models (LLMs) in downstream tasks by integrating external knowledge. To facilitate researchers in deploying RAG systems, various RAG toolkits have been introduced. However, many existing RAG toolkits lack support for knowledge adaptation tailored to specific application scenarios. To address this limitation, we propose UltraRAG, a RAG toolkit that automates knowledge adaptation throughout the entire workflow, from data construction and training to evaluation, while ensuring ease of use. UltraRAG features a user-friendly WebUI that streamlines the RAG process, allowing users to build and optimize systems without coding expertise. It supports multimodal input and provides comprehensive tools for managing the knowledge base. With its highly modular architecture, UltraRAG delivers an end-to-end development solution, enabling seamless knowledge adaptation across diverse user scenarios. The code, demonstration videos, and installable package for UltraRAG are publicly available at https://github.com/OpenBMB/UltraRAG.

Multi-hop reasoning over financial disclosures is often a retrieval problem before it becomes a reasoning or generation problem: relevant facts are dispersed across sections, filings, companies, and years, and LLMs often expend excessive tokens navigating noisy context. Without precise Knowledge Graph (KG)-guided selection of relevant context, even strong reasoning models either fail to answer or consume excessive tokens, whereas KG-linked evidence enables models to focus their reasoning on composing already retrieved facts. We present FinReflectKG - MultiHop, a benchmark built on FinReflectKG, a temporally indexed financial KG that links audited triples to source chunks from S&P 100 filings (2022-2024). Mining frequent 2-3 hop subgraph patterns across sectors (via GICS taxonomy), we generate financial analyst style questions with exact supporting evidence from the KG. A two-phase pipeline first creates QA pairs via pattern-specific prompts, followed by a multi-criteria quality control evaluation to ensure QA validity. We then evaluate three controlled retrieval scenarios: (S1) precise KG-linked paths; (S2) text-only page windows centered on relevant text spans; and (S3) relevant page windows with randomizations and distractors. Across both reasoning and non-reasoning models, KG-guided precise retrieval yields substantial gains on the FinReflectKG - MultiHop QA benchmark dataset, boosting correctness scores by approximately 24 percent while reducing token utilization by approximately 84.5 percent compared to the page window setting, which reflects the traditional vector retrieval paradigm. Spanning intra-document, inter-year, and cross-company scopes, our work underscores the pivotal role of knowledge graphs in efficiently connecting evidence for multi-hop financial QA. We also release a curated subset of the benchmark (555 QA Pairs) to catalyze further research.

Open-domain Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC) faces significant challenges in an ever-changing world, especially when considering the continual emergence of new entities in daily news. Existing approaches for KGC mainly rely on pretrained language models' parametric knowledge, pre-constructed queries, or single-step retrieval, typically requiring substantial supervision and training data. Even so, they often fail to capture comprehensive and up-to-date information about unpopular and/or emerging entities. To this end, we introduce Agentic Reasoning for Emerging Entities (AgREE), a novel agent-based framework that combines iterative retrieval actions and multi-step reasoning to dynamically construct rich knowledge graph triplets. Experiments show that, despite requiring zero training efforts, AgREE significantly outperforms existing methods in constructing knowledge graph triplets, especially for emerging entities that were not seen during language models' training processes, outperforming previous methods by up to 13.7%. Moreover, we propose a new evaluation methodology that addresses a fundamental weakness of existing setups and a new benchmark for KGC on emerging entities. Our work demonstrates the effectiveness of combining agent-based reasoning with strategic information retrieval for maintaining up-to-date knowledge graphs in dynamic information environments.

Constantly evolving real-world knowledge necessitates models to be updated continuously. Especially in medicine, as clinical evidence changes over time, outdated knowledge can pose safety risks. Existing evaluations of knowledge integration focus on factual recall, offering limited insight into whether newly integrated knowledge is actually usable. Our benchmark MedKIT (Medical Knowledge Integration and Transfer) provides a granular evaluation of how models integrate and apply knowledge under realistic sequences of clinical updates. Each instance corresponds to a factual update derived from clinical evidence, paired with targeted probes that assess transfer across lexical variation, relational transformations, compositional reasoning, and open-ended operationalization, as well as locality tests for knowledge preservation. Using MedKIT, we conduct a large-scale empirical study of 12 knowledge integration strategies across 5 diverse models, including both general-purpose and medical LLMs. Our results reveal a consistent gap between recall and usable knowledge: while most methods achieve strong gains on the original update task and under lexical variation, relational generalization is limited, and no method yields meaningful improvements on compositional or operational tasks. These findings highlight a fundamental challenge in knowledge integration and position MedKIT as a testbed for developing methods that make newly integrated knowledge more consistently usable across tasks and contexts.

This survey presents an in-depth exploration of knowledge distillation (KD) techniques within the realm of Large Language Models (LLMs), spotlighting the pivotal role of KD in transferring sophisticated capabilities from proprietary giants such as GPT-4 to accessible, open-source models like LLaMA and Mistral. Amidst the evolving AI landscape, this work elucidates the critical disparities between proprietary and open-source LLMs, demonstrating how KD serves as an essential conduit for imbuing the latter with the former's advanced functionalities and nuanced understandings. Our survey is meticulously structured around three foundational pillars: algorithm, skill, and verticalization -- providing a comprehensive examination of KD mechanisms, the enhancement of specific cognitive abilities, and their practical implications across diverse fields. Crucially, the survey navigates the intricate interplay between data augmentation (DA) and KD, illustrating how DA emerges as a powerful paradigm within the KD framework to bolster LLMs' performance. By leveraging DA to generate context-rich, skill-specific training data, KD transcends traditional boundaries, enabling open-source models to approximate the contextual adeptness, ethical alignment, and deep semantic insights characteristic of their proprietary counterparts. This work aims to provide an insightful guide for researchers and practitioners, offering a detailed overview of current methodologies in knowledge distillation and proposing future research directions. By bridging the gap between proprietary and open-source LLMs, this survey underscores the potential for more accessible, efficient, and sustainable AI solutions, fostering a more inclusive and equitable landscape in AI advancements. An associated Github repository is available at https://github.com/Tebmer/Awesome-Knowledge-Distillation-of-LLMs.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a common strategy to reduce hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs). While reinforcement learning (RL) can enable LLMs to act as search agents by activating retrieval capabilities, existing ones often underutilize their internal knowledge. This can lead to redundant retrievals, potential harmful knowledge conflicts, and increased inference latency. To address these limitations, an efficient and adaptive search agent capable of discerning optimal retrieval timing and synergistically integrating parametric (internal) and retrieved (external) knowledge is in urgent need. This paper introduces the Reinforced Internal-External Knowledge Synergistic Reasoning Agent (IKEA), which could indentify its own knowledge boundary and prioritize the utilization of internal knowledge, resorting to external search only when internal knowledge is deemed insufficient. This is achieved using a novel knowledge-boundary aware reward function and a knowledge-boundary aware training dataset. These are designed for internal-external knowledge synergy oriented RL, incentivizing the model to deliver accurate answers, minimize unnecessary retrievals, and encourage appropriate external searches when its own knowledge is lacking. Evaluations across multiple knowledge reasoning tasks demonstrate that IKEA significantly outperforms baseline methods, reduces retrieval frequency significantly, and exhibits robust generalization capabilities.

The advent of Large Language Models has revolutionized information retrieval, ushering in a new era of expansive knowledge accessibility. While these models excel in providing open-world knowledge, effectively extracting answers in diverse linguistic environments with varying levels of literacy remains a formidable challenge. Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) emerges as a promising solution, bridging the gap between information availability and multilingual comprehension. However, deploying RAG models in real-world scenarios demands careful consideration of various factors. This paper addresses the critical challenges associated with implementing RAG models in multicultural environments. We delve into essential considerations, including data feeding strategies, timely updates, mitigation of hallucinations, prevention of erroneous responses, and optimization of delivery speed. Our work involves the integration of a diverse array of tools, meticulously combined to facilitate the seamless adoption of RAG models across languages and literacy levels within a multicultural organizational context. Through strategic tweaks in our approaches, we achieve not only effectiveness but also efficiency, ensuring the accelerated and accurate delivery of information in a manner that is tailored to the unique requirements of multilingual and multicultural settings.

Knowledge distillation is a strategy of training a student network with guide of the soft output from a teacher network. It has been a successful method of model compression and knowledge transfer. However, currently knowledge distillation lacks a convincing theoretical understanding. On the other hand, recent finding on neural tangent kernel enables us to approximate a wide neural network with a linear model of the network's random features. In this paper, we theoretically analyze the knowledge distillation of a wide neural network. First we provide a transfer risk bound for the linearized model of the network. Then we propose a metric of the task's training difficulty, called data inefficiency. Based on this metric, we show that for a perfect teacher, a high ratio of teacher's soft labels can be beneficial. Finally, for the case of imperfect teacher, we find that hard labels can correct teacher's wrong prediction, which explains the practice of mixing hard and soft labels.

In this work, we investigate how a model's tendency to broadly integrate its parametric knowledge evolves throughout pretraining, and how this behavior affects overall performance, particularly in terms of knowledge acquisition and forgetting. We introduce the concept of knowledge entropy, which quantifies the range of memory sources the model engages with; high knowledge entropy indicates that the model utilizes a wide range of memory sources, while low knowledge entropy suggests reliance on specific sources with greater certainty. Our analysis reveals a consistent decline in knowledge entropy as pretraining advances. We also find that the decline is closely associated with a reduction in the model's ability to acquire and retain knowledge, leading us to conclude that diminishing knowledge entropy (smaller number of active memory sources) impairs the model's knowledge acquisition and retention capabilities. We find further support for this by demonstrating that increasing the activity of inactive memory sources enhances the model's capacity for knowledge acquisition and retention.

Large Language Models (LLMs) assist in specialized tasks but struggle to align with evolving domain knowledge without costly fine-tuning. Domain knowledge consists of: Knowledge: Immutable facts (e.g., 'A stone is solid') and generally accepted principles (e.g., ethical standards); Refined Memory: Evolving insights shaped by business needs and real-world changes. However, a significant gap often exists between a domain expert's deep, nuanced understanding and the system's domain knowledge, which can hinder accurate information retrieval and application. Our Memory-Augmented Refinement of Knowledge (MARK) framework enables LLMs to continuously learn without retraining by leveraging structured refined memory, inspired by the Society of Mind. MARK operates through specialized agents, each serving a distinct role: Residual Refined Memory Agent: Stores and retrieves domain-specific insights to maintain context over time; User Question Refined Memory Agent: Captures user-provided facts, abbreviations, and terminology for better comprehension; LLM Response Refined Memory Agent: Extracts key elements from responses for refinement and personalization. These agents analyse stored refined memory, detect patterns, resolve contradictions, and improve response accuracy. Temporal factors like recency and frequency prioritize relevant information while discarding outdated insights. MARK enhances LLMs in multiple ways: Ground Truth Strategy: Reduces hallucinations by establishing a structured reference; Domain-Specific Adaptation: Essential for fields like healthcare, law, and manufacturing, where proprietary insights are absent from public datasets; Personalized AI Assistants: Improves virtual assistants by remembering user preferences, ensuring coherent responses over time.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques leverage the in-context learning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to produce more accurate and relevant responses. Originating from the simple 'retrieve-then-read' approach, the RAG framework has evolved into a highly flexible and modular paradigm. A critical component, the Query Rewriter module, enhances knowledge retrieval by generating a search-friendly query. This method aligns input questions more closely with the knowledge base. Our research identifies opportunities to enhance the Query Rewriter module to Query Rewriter+ by generating multiple queries to overcome the Information Plateaus associated with a single query and by rewriting questions to eliminate Ambiguity, thereby clarifying the underlying intent. We also find that current RAG systems exhibit issues with Irrelevant Knowledge; to overcome this, we propose the Knowledge Filter. These two modules are both based on the instruction-tuned Gemma-2B model, which together enhance response quality. The final identified issue is Redundant Retrieval; we introduce the Memory Knowledge Reservoir and the Retriever Trigger to solve this. The former supports the dynamic expansion of the RAG system's knowledge base in a parameter-free manner, while the latter optimizes the cost for accessing external knowledge, thereby improving resource utilization and response efficiency. These four RAG modules synergistically improve the response quality and efficiency of the RAG system. The effectiveness of these modules has been validated through experiments and ablation studies across six common QA datasets. The source code can be accessed at https://github.com/Ancientshi/ERM4.

Time series forecasting plays a crucial role in data mining, driving rapid advancements across numerous industries. With the emergence of large models, time series foundation models (TSFMs) have exhibited remarkable generalization capabilities, such as zero-shot learning, through large-scale pre-training. Meanwhile, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) methods have been widely employed to enhance the performance of foundation models on unseen data, allowing models to access to external knowledge. In this paper, we introduce TimeRAF, a Retrieval-Augmented Forecasting model that enhance zero-shot time series forecasting through retrieval-augmented techniques. We develop customized time series knowledge bases that are tailored to the specific forecasting tasks. TimeRAF employs an end-to-end learnable retriever to extract valuable information from the knowledge base. Additionally, we propose Channel Prompting for knowledge integration, which effectively extracts relevant information from the retrieved knowledge along the channel dimension. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our model, showing significant improvement across various domains and datasets.

Paywalls, licenses and copyright rules often restrict the broad dissemination and reuse of scientific knowledge. We take the position that it is both legally and technically feasible to extract the scientific knowledge in scholarly texts. Current methods, like text embeddings, fail to reliably preserve factual content, and simple paraphrasing may not be legally sound. We urge the community to adopt a new idea: convert scholarly documents into Knowledge Units using LLMs. These units use structured data capturing entities, attributes and relationships without stylistic content. We provide evidence that Knowledge Units: (1) form a legally defensible framework for sharing knowledge from copyrighted research texts, based on legal analyses of German copyright law and U.S. Fair Use doctrine, and (2) preserve most (~95%) factual knowledge from original text, measured by MCQ performance on facts from the original copyrighted text across four research domains. Freeing scientific knowledge from copyright promises transformative benefits for scientific research and education by allowing language models to reuse important facts from copyrighted text. To support this, we share open-source tools for converting research documents into Knowledge Units. Overall, our work posits the feasibility of democratizing access to scientific knowledge while respecting copyright.

Large reasoning models (LRMs), such as OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeek-R1, demonstrate impressive long-horizon reasoning capabilities. However, their reliance on static internal knowledge limits their performance on complex, knowledge-intensive tasks and hinders their ability to produce comprehensive research reports requiring synthesis of diverse web information. To address this, we propose WebThinker, a deep research agent that empowers LRMs to autonomously search the web, navigate web pages, and draft research reports during the reasoning process. WebThinker integrates a Deep Web Explorer module, enabling LRMs to dynamically search, navigate, and extract information from the web when encountering knowledge gaps. It also employs an Autonomous Think-Search-and-Draft strategy, allowing the model to seamlessly interleave reasoning, information gathering, and report writing in real time. To further enhance research tool utilization, we introduce an RL-based training strategy via iterative online Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). Extensive experiments on complex reasoning benchmarks (GPQA, GAIA, WebWalkerQA, HLE) and scientific report generation tasks (Glaive) demonstrate that WebThinker significantly outperforms existing methods and strong proprietary systems. Our approach enhances LRM reliability and applicability in complex scenarios, paving the way for more capable and versatile deep research systems. The code is available at https://github.com/RUC-NLPIR/WebThinker.

We present chain-of-knowledge (CoK), a novel framework that augments large language models (LLMs) by dynamically incorporating grounding information from heterogeneous sources. It results in more factual rationales and reduced hallucination in generation. Specifically, CoK consists of three stages: reasoning preparation, dynamic knowledge adapting, and answer consolidation. Given a knowledge-intensive question, CoK first prepares several preliminary rationales and answers while identifying the relevant knowledge domains. If there is no majority consensus among the answers from samples, CoK corrects the rationales step by step by adapting knowledge from the identified domains. These corrected rationales can plausibly serve as a better foundation for the final answer consolidation. Unlike prior studies that primarily use unstructured data, CoK also leverages structured knowledge sources such as Wikidata and tables that provide more reliable factual information. To access both unstructured and structured knowledge sources in the dynamic knowledge adapting stage, we propose an adaptive query generator that allows the generation of queries for various types of query languages, including SPARQL, SQL, and natural sentences. Moreover, to minimize error propagation between rationales, CoK corrects the rationales progressively using preceding corrected rationales to generate and correct subsequent rationales. Extensive experiments show that CoK consistently improves the performance of LLMs on knowledge-intensive tasks across different domains.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mitigates issues of the factual errors and hallucinated outputs generated by Large Language Models (LLMs) in open-domain question-answering tasks (OpenQA) via introducing external knowledge. For complex QA, however, existing RAG methods use LLMs to actively predict retrieval timing and directly use the retrieved information for generation, regardless of whether the retrieval timing accurately reflects the actual information needs, or sufficiently considers prior retrieved knowledge, which may result in insufficient information gathering and interaction, yielding low-quality answers. To address these, we propose a generic RAG approach called Adaptive Note-Enhanced RAG (Adaptive-Note) for complex QA tasks, which includes the iterative information collector, adaptive memory reviewer, and task-oriented generator, while following a new Retriever-and-Memory paradigm. Specifically, Adaptive-Note introduces an overarching view of knowledge growth, iteratively gathering new information in the form of notes and updating them into the existing optimal knowledge structure, enhancing high-quality knowledge interactions. In addition, we employ an adaptive, note-based stop-exploration strategy to decide "what to retrieve and when to stop" to encourage sufficient knowledge exploration. We conduct extensive experiments on five complex QA datasets, and the results demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of our method and its components. The code and data are at https://github.com/thunlp/Adaptive-Note.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful but prone to hallucinations due to static knowledge. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) helps by injecting external information, but current methods often are costly, generalize poorly, or ignore the internal knowledge of the model. In this paper, we introduce R1-Searcher++, a novel framework designed to train LLMs to adaptively leverage both internal and external knowledge sources. R1-Searcher++ employs a two-stage training strategy: an initial SFT Cold-start phase for preliminary format learning, followed by RL for Dynamic Knowledge Acquisition. The RL stage uses outcome-supervision to encourage exploration, incorporates a reward mechanism for internal knowledge utilization, and integrates a memorization mechanism to continuously assimilate retrieved information, thereby enriching the model's internal knowledge. By leveraging internal knowledge and external search engine, the model continuously improves its capabilities, enabling efficient retrieval-augmented reasoning. Our experiments demonstrate that R1-Searcher++ outperforms previous RAG and reasoning methods and achieves efficient retrieval. The code is available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/R1-Searcher-plus.

Enterprise software organizations accumulate critical institutional knowledge - architectural decisions, deployment procedures, compliance policies, incident playbooks - yet this knowledge remains trapped in formats designed for human interpretation. The bottleneck to effective agentic software development is not model capability but knowledge architecture. When any knowledge consumer - an autonomous AI agent, a newly onboarded engineer, or a senior developer - encounters an enterprise task without institutional context, the result is guesswork, correction cascades, and a disproportionate tax on senior engineers who must manually supply what others cannot infer. This paper introduces Knowledge Activation, a framework that specializes AI Skills - the open standard for agent-consumable knowledge - into structured, governance-aware Atomic Knowledge Units (AKUs) for institutional knowledge delivery. Rather than retrieving documents for interpretation, AKUs deliver action - ready specifications encoding what to do, which tools to use, what constraints to respect, and where to go next - so that agents act correctly and engineers receive institutionally grounded guidance without reconstructing organizational context from scratch. AKUs form a composable knowledge graph that agents traverse at runtime - compressing onboarding, reducing cross - team friction, and eliminating correction cascades. The paper formalizes the resource constraints that make this architecture necessary, specifies the AKU schema and deployment architecture, and grounds long - term maintenance in knowledge commons practice. Organizations that architect their institutional knowledge for the agentic era will outperform those that invest solely in model capability.

We introduce KnowledgeMath, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs' capabilities in applying financial knowledge to solve complex math word problems. Compared to prior works, this study features three core advancements. First, KnowledgeMath includes 1,259 problems with a hybrid of textual and tabular content and require college-level knowledge in the finance domain for effective resolution. Second, we provide expert-annotated, detailed solution references in Python program format, ensuring a high-quality benchmark for LLM assessment. Finally, we evaluate a wide spectrum of 14 LLMs with different prompting strategies like Chain-of-Thoughts and Program-of-Thoughts. The current best-performing system (i.e., GPT-4 with Program-of-Thoughts) achieves only 45.4% accuracy, leaving substantial room for improvement. While knowledge-augmented LLMs can improve the performance (e.g., from 23.9% to 32.0% for GPT-3.5), it is still significantly lower the estimated human expert performance of 94%. We believe that KnowledgeMath can facilitate future research on domain-specific knowledge retrieval and augmentation into the math word problem-solving process. We will release the benchmark and code at https://github.com/yale-nlp/KnowledgeMath.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved exceptional capabilities in open generation across various domains, yet they encounter difficulties with tasks that require intensive knowledge. To address these challenges, methods for integrating knowledge have been developed, which augment LLMs with domain-specific knowledge graphs through external modules. These approaches, however, face data inefficiency issues as they necessitate the processing of both known and unknown knowledge for fine-tuning. Thus, our research focuses on a novel problem: efficiently integrating unknown knowledge into LLMs without unnecessary overlap of known knowledge. A risk of introducing new knowledge is the potential forgetting of existing knowledge. To mitigate this risk, we propose the innovative {\method} framework. This framework employs transformer internal states to determine when to enrich LLM outputs with additional information, effectively preventing knowledge forgetting. Performance evaluations using the UMLS-2.5k and MetaQA domain knowledge graphs reveal that {\method} not only successfully integrates new knowledge but also outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, reducing knowledge forgetting by 9\% and 6\%, respectively.

Knowledge Distillation (KD) is a model-agnostic technique to improve model quality while having a fixed capacity budget. It is a commonly used technique for model compression, where a larger capacity teacher model with better quality is used to train a more compact student model with better inference efficiency. Through distillation, one hopes to benefit from student's compactness, without sacrificing too much on model quality. Despite the large success of knowledge distillation, better understanding of how it benefits student model's training dynamics remains under-explored. In this paper, we categorize teacher's knowledge into three hierarchical levels and study its effects on knowledge distillation: (1) knowledge of the `universe', where KD brings a regularization effect through label smoothing; (2) domain knowledge, where teacher injects class relationships prior to student's logit layer geometry; and (3) instance specific knowledge, where teacher rescales student model's per-instance gradients based on its measurement on the event difficulty. Using systematic analyses and extensive empirical studies on both synthetic and real-world datasets, we confirm that the aforementioned three factors play a major role in knowledge distillation. Furthermore, based on our findings, we diagnose some of the failure cases of applying KD from recent studies.

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in natural language processing by encoding extensive human knowledge, but their utility relies on timely updates as knowledge evolves. Updating LLMs involves two key tasks simultaneously: unlearning to remove unwanted knowledge and editing to incorporate new information. Existing methods face two major challenges: ineffective knowledge storage (either too sparse or too dense) and task conflicts between editing and unlearning, as validated through our theoretical and experimental results. To address these issues, we propose LOKA, a conflict-free framework for LLM updating based on a knowledge codebook. During training, updated knowledge is stored in multiple codebook memories. To optimize knowledge storage, a similarity-aware knowledge mapping ensures that related knowledge pieces are clustered and allocated to the same memory. Additionally, LOKA resolves task conflicts by employing task-specific and multi-task memories guided by a conflict score. In the inference stage, LOKA retrieves the most relevant memory from the codebook and plugs it into the original LLM to apply the updated knowledge. A learning-based router controls codebook activation to further improve knowledge utilization. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of LOKA in LLM knowledge updating tasks.

Language models are known to encode a great amount of factual knowledge through pretraining. However, such knowledge might be insufficient to cater to user requests, requiring the model to integrate external knowledge sources and adhere to user-provided specifications. When answering questions about ongoing events, the model should use recent news articles to update its response; when asked to provide recommendations, the model should prioritize user specifications over retrieved product reviews; when some facts are edited in the model, the updated facts should override all prior knowledge learned by the model even if they are conflicting. In all of the cases above, the model faces a decision between its own parametric knowledge, (retrieved) contextual knowledge, and user instruction knowledge. In this paper, we (1) unify such settings into the problem of knowledge preference and define a three-level preference hierarchy over these knowledge sources; (2) compile a collection of existing datasets IfQA, MQuAKE, and MRQA covering a combination of settings (with/without user specifications, with/without context documents) to systematically evaluate how well models obey the intended knowledge preference; and (3) propose a dataset synthesis method that composes diverse question-answer pairs with user assumptions and related context to directly fine-tune LMs for instilling the hierarchy of knowledge. We demonstrate that a 7B model, fine-tuned on only a few thousand examples automatically generated by our proposed method, effectively achieves superior performance (more than 18% improvement across all evaluation benchmarks) in adhering to the desired knowledge preference hierarchy.

Ensuring factual accuracy while maintaining the creative capabilities of Large Language Model Agents (LMAs) poses significant challenges in the development of intelligent agent systems. LMAs face prevalent issues such as information hallucinations, catastrophic forgetting, and limitations in processing long contexts when dealing with knowledge-intensive tasks. This paper introduces a KG-RAG (Knowledge Graph-Retrieval Augmented Generation) pipeline, a novel framework designed to enhance the knowledge capabilities of LMAs by integrating structured Knowledge Graphs (KGs) with the functionalities of LLMs, thereby significantly reducing the reliance on the latent knowledge of LLMs. The KG-RAG pipeline constructs a KG from unstructured text and then performs information retrieval over the newly created graph to perform KGQA (Knowledge Graph Question Answering). The retrieval methodology leverages a novel algorithm called Chain of Explorations (CoE) which benefits from LLMs reasoning to explore nodes and relationships within the KG sequentially. Preliminary experiments on the ComplexWebQuestions dataset demonstrate notable improvements in the reduction of hallucinated content and suggest a promising path toward developing intelligent systems adept at handling knowledge-intensive tasks.

In knowledge distillation, since a single, omnipotent teacher network cannot solve all problems, multiple teacher-based knowledge distillations have been studied recently. However, sometimes their improvements are not as good as expected because some immature teachers may transfer the false knowledge to the student. In this paper, to overcome this limitation and take the efficacy of the multiple networks, we divide the multiple networks into teacher and student groups, respectively. That is, the student group is a set of immature networks that require learning the teacher's knowledge, while the teacher group consists of the selected networks that are capable of teaching successfully. We propose our online role change strategy where the top-ranked networks in the student group are able to promote to the teacher group at every iteration. After training the teacher group using the error samples of the student group to refine the teacher group's knowledge, we transfer the collaborative knowledge from the teacher group to the student group successfully. We verify the superiority of the proposed method on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet which achieves high performance. We further show the generality of our method with various backbone architectures such as ResNet, WRN, VGG, Mobilenet, and Shufflenet.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have achieved promising performances across various applications. Nonetheless, the ongoing challenge of integrating long-tail knowledge continues to impede the seamless adoption of LLMs in specialized domains. In this work, we introduce DALK, a.k.a. Dynamic Co-Augmentation of LLMs and KG, to address this limitation and demonstrate its ability on studying Alzheimer's Disease (AD), a specialized sub-field in biomedicine and a global health priority. With a synergized framework of LLM and KG mutually enhancing each other, we first leverage LLM to construct an evolving AD-specific knowledge graph (KG) sourced from AD-related scientific literature, and then we utilize a coarse-to-fine sampling method with a novel self-aware knowledge retrieval approach to select appropriate knowledge from the KG to augment LLM inference capabilities. The experimental results, conducted on our constructed AD question answering (ADQA) benchmark, underscore the efficacy of DALK. Additionally, we perform a series of detailed analyses that can offer valuable insights and guidelines for the emerging topic of mutually enhancing KG and LLM. We will release the code and data at https://github.com/David-Li0406/DALK.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising performance in knowledge-intensive reasoning tasks that require a compound understanding of knowledge. However, deployment of the LLMs in real-world applications can be challenging due to their high computational requirements and concerns on data privacy. Previous studies have focused on building task-specific small language models (LMs) by fine-tuning them with labeled data or distilling LLMs. However, these approaches are ill-suited for knowledge-intensive reasoning tasks due to the limited capacity of small LMs in memorizing the knowledge required. Motivated by our theoretical analysis on memorization, we propose Knowledge-Augmented Reasoning Distillation (KARD), a novel method that fine-tunes small LMs to generate rationales with augmented knowledge retrieved from an external knowledge base. Moreover, we further propose a neural reranker to obtain documents relevant to rationale generation. We empirically show that KARD significantly improves the performance of small T5 and Flan-T5 models on the challenging knowledge-intensive reasoning datasets, namely MedQA-USMLE and StrategyQA. Notably, our method makes the 250M models achieve superior performance against the fine-tuned 3B models, having 12 times larger parameters, on both MedQA-USMLE and StrategyQA benchmarks.

The growing popularity of data mining catalyses the researchers to explore various exciting aspects of education. Early prediction of student performance is an emerging area among them. The researchers have used various predictors in performance modelling studies. Although prior cognition can affect student performance, establishing their relationship is still an open research challenge. Quantifying the knowledge from readily available data is the major challenge here. We have proposed a semantic approach for this purpose. Association mining on nearly 0.35 million observations establishes that prior cognition impacts the student performance. The proposed approach of measuring domain knowledge can help the early performance modelling studies to use it as a predictor.

Advanced Large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 or LlaMa 3 provide superior performance in complex human-like interactions. But they are costly, or too large for edge devices such as smartphones and harder to self-host, leading to security and privacy concerns. This paper introduces a novel interpretable knowledge distillation approach to enhance the performance of smaller, more economical LLMs that firms can self-host. We study this problem in the context of building a customer service agent aimed at achieving high customer satisfaction through goal-oriented dialogues. Unlike traditional knowledge distillation, where the "student" model learns directly from the "teacher" model's responses via fine-tuning, our interpretable "strategy" teaching approach involves the teacher providing strategies to improve the student's performance in various scenarios. This method alternates between a "scenario generation" step and a "strategies for improvement" step, creating a customized library of scenarios and optimized strategies for automated prompting. The method requires only black-box access to both student and teacher models; hence it can be used without manipulating model parameters. In our customer service application, the method improves performance, and the learned strategies are transferable to other LLMs and scenarios beyond the training set. The method's interpretabilty helps safeguard against potential harms through human audit.

Characterizing a large language model's (LLM's) knowledge of a given question is challenging. As a result, prior work has primarily examined LLM behavior under knowledge conflicts, where the model's internal parametric memory contradicts information in the external context. However, this does not fully reflect how well the model knows the answer to the question. In this paper, we first introduce a taxonomy of five knowledge statuses based on the consistency and correctness of LLM knowledge modes. We then propose KScope, a hierarchical framework of statistical tests that progressively refines hypotheses about knowledge modes and characterizes LLM knowledge into one of these five statuses. We apply KScope to nine LLMs across four datasets and systematically establish: (1) Supporting context narrows knowledge gaps across models. (2) Context features related to difficulty, relevance, and familiarity drive successful knowledge updates. (3) LLMs exhibit similar feature preferences when partially correct or conflicted, but diverge sharply when consistently wrong. (4) Context summarization constrained by our feature analysis, together with enhanced credibility, further improves update effectiveness and generalizes across LLMs.

Large language models often encounter challenges with static knowledge and hallucinations, which undermine their reliability. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) mitigates these issues by incorporating external information. However, user queries frequently contain noise and intent deviations, necessitating query rewriting to improve the relevance of retrieved documents. In this paper, we introduce DMQR-RAG, a Diverse Multi-Query Rewriting framework designed to improve the performance of both document retrieval and final responses in RAG. Specifically, we investigate how queries with varying information quantities can retrieve a diverse array of documents, presenting four rewriting strategies that operate at different levels of information to enhance the performance of baseline approaches. Additionally, we propose an adaptive strategy selection method that minimizes the number of rewrites while optimizing overall performance. Our methods have been rigorously validated through extensive experiments conducted in both academic and industry settings.

In recent years, short Text Matching tasks have been widely applied in the fields ofadvertising search and recommendation. The difficulty lies in the lack of semantic information and word ambiguity caused by the short length of the text. Previous works have introduced complement sentences or knowledge bases to provide additional feature information. However, these methods have not fully interacted between the original sentence and the complement sentence, and have not considered the noise issue that may arise from the introduction of external knowledge bases. Therefore, this paper proposes a short Text Matching model that combines contrastive learning and external knowledge. The model uses a generative model to generate corresponding complement sentences and uses the contrastive learning method to guide the model to obtain more semantically meaningful encoding of the original sentence. In addition, to avoid noise, we use keywords as the main semantics of the original sentence to retrieve corresponding knowledge words in the knowledge base, and construct a knowledge graph. The graph encoding model is used to integrate the knowledge base information into the model. Our designed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on two publicly available Chinese Text Matching datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness of our model.

The cultivation of expertise for large language models (LLMs) to solve tasks of specific areas often requires special-purpose tuning with calibrated behaviors on the expected stable outputs. To avoid huge cost brought by manual preparation of instruction datasets and training resources up to hundreds of hours, the exploitation of open knowledge including a wealth of low rank adaptation (LoRA) models and instruction datasets serves as a good starting point. However, existing methods on model and data selection focus on the performance of general-purpose capabilities while neglecting the knowledge gap exposed in domain-specific deployment. In the present study, we propose to bridge such gap by introducing few human-annotated samples (i.e., K-shot) for advancing task expertise of LLMs with open knowledge. Specifically, we develop an efficient and scalable pipeline to cost-efficiently produce task experts where K-shot data intervene in selecting the most promising expert candidates and the task-relevant instructions. A mixture-of-expert (MoE) system is built to make the best use of individual-yet-complementary knowledge between multiple experts. We unveil the two keys to the success of a MoE system, 1) the abidance by K-shot, and 2) the insistence on diversity. For the former, we ensure that models that truly possess problem-solving abilities on K-shot are selected rather than those blind guessers. Besides, during data selection, instructions that share task-relevant contexts with K-shot are prioritized. For the latter, we highlight the diversity of constituting experts and that of the fine-tuning instructions throughout the model and data selection process. Extensive experimental results confirm the superiority of our approach over existing methods on utilization of open knowledge across various tasks. Codes and models will be released later.

Generative Knowledge Graph Construction (KGC) refers to those methods that leverage the sequence-to-sequence framework for building knowledge graphs, which is flexible and can be adapted to widespread tasks. In this study, we summarize the recent compelling progress in generative knowledge graph construction. We present the advantages and weaknesses of each paradigm in terms of different generation targets and provide theoretical insight and empirical analysis. Based on the review, we suggest promising research directions for the future. Our contributions are threefold: (1) We present a detailed, complete taxonomy for the generative KGC methods; (2) We provide a theoretical and empirical analysis of the generative KGC methods; (3) We propose several research directions that can be developed in the future.

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the field of natural language processing, with GPT models at the forefront. While their remarkable performance spans a range of tasks, adapting LLMs for real-world business scenarios still poses challenges warranting further investigation. This paper presents an empirical analysis aimed at bridging the gap in adapting LLMs to practical use cases. To do that, we select the question answering (QA) task of insurance as a case study due to its challenge of reasoning. Based on the task we design a new model relied on LLMs which are empowered by additional knowledge extracted from insurance policy rulebooks and DBpedia. The additional knowledge helps LLMs to understand new concepts of insurance for domain adaptation. Preliminary results on two QA datasets show that knowledge enhancement significantly improves the reasoning ability of GPT-3.5 (55.80% and 57.83% in terms of accuracy). The analysis also indicates that existing public knowledge bases, e.g., DBPedia is beneficial for knowledge enhancement. Our findings reveal that the inherent complexity of business scenarios often necessitates the incorporation of domain-specific knowledge and external resources for effective problem-solving.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in understanding and generating responses to complex queries through large-scale pre-training. However, the efficacy of these models in memorizing and reasoning among large-scale structured knowledge, especially world knowledge that explicitly covers abundant factual information remains questionable. Addressing this gap, our research investigates whether LLMs can effectively store, recall, and reason with knowledge on a large scale comparable to latest knowledge bases (KBs) such as Wikidata. Specifically, we focus on three crucial aspects to study the viability: (1) the efficiency of LLMs with different sizes in memorizing the exact knowledge in the large-scale KB; (2) the flexibility of recalling the memorized knowledge in response to natural language queries; (3) the capability to infer new knowledge through reasoning. Our findings indicate that while LLMs hold promise as large-scale KBs capable of retrieving and responding with flexibility, enhancements in their reasoning capabilities are necessary to fully realize their potential.

Concept customization typically binds rare tokens to a target concept. Unfortunately, these approaches often suffer from unstable performance as the pretraining data seldom contains these rare tokens. Meanwhile, these rare tokens fail to convey the inherent knowledge of the target concept. Consequently, we introduce Knowledge-aware Concept Customization, a novel task aiming at binding diverse textual knowledge to target visual concepts. This task requires the model to identify the knowledge within the text prompt to perform high-fidelity customized generation. Meanwhile, the model should efficiently bind all the textual knowledge to the target concept. Therefore, we propose MoKus, a novel framework for knowledge-aware concept customization. Our framework relies on a key observation: cross-modal knowledge transfer, where modifying knowledge within the text modality naturally transfers to the visual modality during generation. Inspired by this observation, MoKus contains two stages: (1) In visual concept learning, we first learn the anchor representation to store the visual information of the target concept. (2) In textual knowledge updating, we update the answer for the knowledge queries to the anchor representation, enabling high-fidelity customized generation. To further comprehensively evaluate our proposed MoKus on the new task, we introduce the first benchmark for knowledge-aware concept customization: KnowCusBench. Extensive evaluations have demonstrated that MoKus outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, the cross-model knowledge transfer allows MoKus to be easily extended to other knowledge-aware applications like virtual concept creation and concept erasure. We also demonstrate the capability of our method to achieve improvements on world knowledge benchmarks.

Multi-document grounded dialogue systems (DGDS) belong to a class of conversational agents that answer users' requests by finding supporting knowledge from a collection of documents. Most previous studies aim to improve the knowledge retrieval model or propose more effective ways to incorporate external knowledge into a parametric generation model. These methods, however, focus on retrieving knowledge from mono-granularity language units (e.g. passages, sentences, or spans in documents), which is not enough to effectively and efficiently capture precise knowledge in long documents. This paper proposes Re3G, which aims to optimize both coarse-grained knowledge retrieval and fine-grained knowledge extraction in a unified framework. Specifically, the former efficiently finds relevant passages in a retrieval-and-reranking process, whereas the latter effectively extracts finer-grain spans within those passages to incorporate into a parametric answer generation model (BART, T5). Experiments on DialDoc Shared Task demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

We propose knowledge internalization (KI), which aims to complement the lexical knowledge into neural dialog models. Instead of further conditioning the knowledge-grounded dialog (KGD) models on externally retrieved knowledge, we seek to integrate knowledge about each input token internally into the model's parameters. To tackle the challenge due to the large scale of lexical knowledge, we adopt the contrastive learning approach and create an effective token-level lexical knowledge retriever that requires only weak supervision mined from Wikipedia. We demonstrate the effectiveness and general applicability of our approach on various datasets and diversified model structures.

In order to address increasing demands of real-world applications, the research for knowledge-intensive NLP (KI-NLP) should advance by capturing the challenges of a truly open-domain environment: web-scale knowledge, lack of structure, inconsistent quality and noise. To this end, we propose a new setup for evaluating existing knowledge intensive tasks in which we generalize the background corpus to a universal web snapshot. We investigate a slate of NLP tasks which rely on knowledge - either factual or common sense, and ask systems to use a subset of CCNet - the Sphere corpus - as a knowledge source. In contrast to Wikipedia, otherwise a common background corpus in KI-NLP, Sphere is orders of magnitude larger and better reflects the full diversity of knowledge on the web. Despite potential gaps in coverage, challenges of scale, lack of structure and lower quality, we find that retrieval from Sphere enables a state of the art system to match and even outperform Wikipedia-based models on several tasks. We also observe that while a dense index can outperform a sparse BM25 baseline on Wikipedia, on Sphere this is not yet possible. To facilitate further research and minimise the community's reliance on proprietary, black-box search engines, we share our indices, evaluation metrics and infrastructure.

In pace with developments in the research field of artificial intelligence, knowledge graphs (KGs) have attracted a surge of interest from both academia and industry. As a representation of semantic relations between entities, KGs have proven to be particularly relevant for natural language processing (NLP), experiencing a rapid spread and wide adoption within recent years. Given the increasing amount of research work in this area, several KG-related approaches have been surveyed in the NLP research community. However, a comprehensive study that categorizes established topics and reviews the maturity of individual research streams remains absent to this day. Contributing to closing this gap, we systematically analyzed 507 papers from the literature on KGs in NLP. Our survey encompasses a multifaceted review of tasks, research types, and contributions. As a result, we present a structured overview of the research landscape, provide a taxonomy of tasks, summarize our findings, and highlight directions for future work.

Large Language Models (LLMs) often encounter conflicts between their learned, internal (parametric knowledge, PK) and external knowledge provided during inference (contextual knowledge, CK). Understanding how LLMs models prioritize one knowledge source over the other remains a challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel probing framework to explore the mechanisms governing the selection between PK and CK in LLMs. Using controlled prompts designed to contradict the model's PK, we demonstrate that specific model activations are indicative of the knowledge source employed. We evaluate this framework on various LLMs of different sizes and demonstrate that mid-layer activations, particularly those related to relations in the input, are crucial in predicting knowledge source selection, paving the way for more reliable models capable of handling knowledge conflicts effectively.

An effective multi-turn instruction-following assistant can be developed by creating a simulator that can generate useful interaction data. Apart from relying on its intrinsic weights, an ideal user simulator should also be able to bootstrap external knowledge rapidly in its raw form to simulate the multifarious diversity of text available over the internet. Previous user simulators generally lacked diversity, were mostly closed domain, and necessitated rigid schema making them inefficient to rapidly scale to incorporate external knowledge. In this regard, we introduce, Kaucus, a Knowledge-Augmented User Simulator framework, to outline a process of creating diverse user simulators, that can seamlessly exploit external knowledge as well as benefit downstream assistant model training. Through two GPT-J based simulators viz., a Retrieval Augmented Simulator and a Summary Controlled Simulator we generate diverse simulator-assistant interactions. Through reward and preference model-based evaluations, we find that these interactions serve as useful training data and create more helpful downstream assistants. We also find that incorporating knowledge through retrieval augmentation or summary control helps create better assistants.

Retrieval-augmented language models (RALMs) improve performance by accessing long-tail and up-to-date knowledge from external data stores, but are challenging to build. Existing approaches require either expensive retrieval-specific modifications to LM pre-training or use post-hoc integration of the data store that leads to suboptimal performance. We introduce Retrieval-Augmented Dual Instruction Tuning (RA-DIT), a lightweight fine-tuning methodology that provides a third option by retrofitting any LLM with retrieval capabilities. Our approach operates in two distinct fine-tuning steps: (1) one updates a pre-trained LM to better use retrieved information, while (2) the other updates the retriever to return more relevant results, as preferred by the LM. By fine-tuning over tasks that require both knowledge utilization and contextual awareness, we demonstrate that each stage yields significant performance improvements, and using both leads to additional gains. Our best model, RA-DIT 65B, achieves state-of-the-art performance across a range of knowledge-intensive zero- and few-shot learning benchmarks, significantly outperforming existing in-context RALM approaches by up to +8.9% in 0-shot setting and +1.4% in 5-shot setting on average.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are proficient at generating coherent and contextually relevant text but face challenges when addressing knowledge-intensive queries in domain-specific and factual question-answering tasks. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems mitigate this by incorporating external knowledge sources, such as structured knowledge graphs (KGs). However, LLMs often struggle to produce accurate answers despite access to KG-extracted information containing necessary facts. Our study investigates this dilemma by analyzing error patterns in existing KG-based RAG methods and identifying eight critical failure points. We observed that these errors predominantly occur due to insufficient focus on discerning the question's intent and adequately gathering relevant context from the knowledge graph facts. Drawing on this analysis, we propose the Mindful-RAG approach, a framework designed for intent-based and contextually aligned knowledge retrieval. This method explicitly targets the identified failures and offers improvements in the correctness and relevance of responses provided by LLMs, representing a significant step forward from existing methods.

Financial AI agents often fail for a simple reason: they make users carry the complexity. A user must repeatedly restate goals, risk preferences, portfolio context, past judgments, and shifting market assumptions, while the agent answers, retrieves, acts, and forgets. In finance, this is not just inconvenient. In tasks such as market analysis, copy-trading review, and trade preparation, forgotten context and stale memory can create latency, repeated errors, weak auditability, and unsafe decisions. We propose the interaction-native knowledge harness (InKH), an architecture for financial LLM agents that absorbs complexity into the system. InKH converts user, market, portfolio, and tool events into structured operational knowledge. It uses passive knowledge injection to assemble a bounded working context buffer before the main model step, temporal graph memory for low-latency retrieval, a wiki audit surface for human-readable governance, and background extraction with maturity, decay, and write-time invalidation. We evaluate InKH on a reproducible controlled synthetic benchmark with 24 random seeds, 4 rounds, 80 episodes per round, and 6 baselines, producing 46,080 baseline-conditioned evaluations. InKH achieves mean task quality of 0.815 at 900 ms latency. Compared with agent-driven wiki-walk memory, it reduces latency by 82.95 percent, token cost by 82.29 percent, and stale-knowledge usage by 96.58 percent, while improving quality by 0.108 and traceability by 0.461. Compared with a temporal-graph system without invalidation, it improves quality by 0.050 and reduces stale-memory usage by 96.58 percent with comparable serving cost. The results support a design thesis for financial AI: adoption happens when complexity is absorbed by the system rather than transferred to the user. The benchmark validates architecture-level behavior, not live trading performance.

There is a compelling necessity from enterprises for fine tuning LLMs (Large Language Models) o get them trained on proprietary domain knowledge. The challenge is to imbibe the LLMs with domain specific knowledge using the most optimial resource and cost and in the best possible time. Many enterprises rely on RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) which does not need LLMs to be ine-tuned but they are limited by the quality of vector databases and their retrieval capabilities rather than the intrinsic capabilities of the LLMs themselves. In our current work we focus on fine tuning LLaMA, an open source LLM using proprietary documents and code from an enterprise repository and use the fine tuned models to evaluate the quality of responses. As part of this work, we aim to guide beginners on how to start with fine tuning an LLM for documentation and code by making educated guesses on size of GPU required and options that are available for formatting the data. We also propose pre processing recipes for both documentation and code to prepare dataset in different formats. The proposed methods of data preparation for document datasets are forming paragraph chunks, forming question and answer pairs and forming keyword and paragraph chunk pairs. For code dataset we propose forming summary and function pairs. Further, we qualitatively evaluate the results of the models for domain specific queries. Finally, we also propose practical guidelines and recommendations for fine tuning LLMs.

This work explores knowledge distillation (KD) for visually-rich document (VRD) applications such as document layout analysis (DLA) and document image classification (DIC). While VRD research is dependent on increasingly sophisticated and cumbersome models, the field has neglected to study efficiency via model compression. Here, we design a KD experimentation methodology for more lean, performant models on document understanding (DU) tasks that are integral within larger task pipelines. We carefully selected KD strategies (response-based, feature-based) for distilling knowledge to and from backbones with different architectures (ResNet, ViT, DiT) and capacities (base, small, tiny). We study what affects the teacher-student knowledge gap and find that some methods (tuned vanilla KD, MSE, SimKD with an apt projector) can consistently outperform supervised student training. Furthermore, we design downstream task setups to evaluate covariate shift and the robustness of distilled DLA models on zero-shot layout-aware document visual question answering (DocVQA). DLA-KD experiments result in a large mAP knowledge gap, which unpredictably translates to downstream robustness, accentuating the need to further explore how to efficiently obtain more semantic document layout awareness.

Large Multimodal Models encode extensive factual knowledge in their pre-trained weights. However, its knowledge remains static and limited, unable to keep pace with real-world developments, which hinders continuous knowledge acquisition. Effective knowledge injection thus becomes critical, involving two goals: knowledge adaptation (injecting new knowledge) and knowledge retention (preserving old knowledge). Existing methods often struggle to learn new knowledge and suffer from catastrophic forgetting. To address this, we propose KORE, a synergistic method of KnOwledge-oRientEd augmentations and constraints for injecting new knowledge into large multimodal models while preserving old knowledge. Unlike general text or image data augmentation, KORE automatically converts individual knowledge items into structured and comprehensive knowledge to ensure that the model accurately learns new knowledge, enabling accurate adaptation. Meanwhile, KORE stores previous knowledge in the covariance matrix of LMM's linear layer activations and initializes the adapter by projecting the original weights into the matrix's null space, defining a fine-tuning direction that minimizes interference with previous knowledge, enabling powerful retention. Extensive experiments on various LMMs, including LLaVA-v1.5-7B, LLaVA-v1.5-13B, and Qwen2.5-VL-7B, show that KORE achieves superior new knowledge injection performance and effectively mitigates catastrophic forgetting.

Large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT and GPT-4, are versatile and can solve different tasks due to their emergent ability and generalizability. However, LLMs sometimes lack domain-specific knowledge to perform tasks, which would also cause hallucination during inference. In some previous works, additional modules like graph neural networks (GNNs) are trained on retrieved knowledge from external knowledge bases, aiming to mitigate the problem of lacking domain-specific knowledge. However, incorporating additional modules: 1) would need retraining additional modules when encountering novel domains; 2) would become a bottleneck since LLMs' strong abilities are not fully utilized for retrieval. In this paper, we propose a paradigm, termed Knowledge Solver (KSL), to teach LLMs to search for essential knowledge from external knowledge bases by harnessing their own strong generalizability. Specifically, we design a simple yet effective prompt to transform retrieval into a multi-hop decision sequence, which empowers LLMs with searching knowledge ability in zero-shot manner. Additionally, KSL is able to provide complete retrieval paths and therefore increase explainability of LLMs' reasoning processes. We conduct experiments on three datasets: CommonsenseQA, OpenbookQA, and MedQA-USMLE, and found that our approach improves LLM baseline performance by a relatively large margin.

Discovering causal regularities and applying them to build functional systems--the discovery-to-application loop--is a hallmark of general intelligence, yet evaluating this capacity has been hindered by the vast complexity gap between scientific discovery and real-world engineering. We introduce SciCrafter, a Minecraft-based benchmark that operationalizes this loop through parameterized redstone circuit tasks. Agents must ignite lamps in specified patterns (e.g., simultaneously or in timed sequences); scaling target parameters substantially increases construction complexity and required knowledge, forcing genuine discovery rather than reliance on memorized solutions. Evaluating frontier models including GPT-5.2, Gemini-3-Pro, and Claude-Opus-4.5 under a general-purpose code agent scaffold, we find that all plateau at approximately 26% success rate. To diagnose these failures, we decompose the loop into four capacities--knowledge gap identification, experimental discovery, knowledge consolidation, and knowledge application--and design targeted interventions whose marginal contributions serve as proxies for corresponding gaps. Our analysis reveals that although the general knowledge application capability still remains as the biggest gap across all models, for frontier models the knowledge gap identification starts to become a major hurdle--indicating the bottleneck is shifting from solving problems right to raising the right problems for current AI. We release SciCrafter as a diagnostic probe for future research on AI systems that navigate the full discovery-to-application loop.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has empowered Large Language Models (LLMs) to tackle knowledge-intensive tasks. However, navigating global, heterogeneous knowledge bases (large-scale knowledge graphs and text corpora) for complex reasoning remains a challenge. Existing methods typically employ reactive, graph-driven exploration strategies, which blindly follow graph topology without adapting to the question context or evolving exploration progress, and lack deep bidirectional synergy between graph and text. To address these limitations, we propose CoG (Cognition on Graph), a cognitive-inspired, training-free framework for adaptive knowledge exploration. Drawing inspiration from human problem-solving, CoG performs a continuous plan-explore-reflect cycle, where it proactively formulates investigation plans, performs dual-source retrieval, and dynamically reflects on progress to adjust strategies. Crucially, it establishes deep bidirectional synergy between structured graph and unstructured text, where entities extracted from text dynamically guide graph exploration to bridge knowledge gaps. Extensive experiments on seven multi-hop QA benchmarks demonstrate that CoG significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods while achieving superior exploration efficiency. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/zhougengxian/CoG.

As large language models (LLMs) are more frequently used in retrieval-augmented generation pipelines, it is increasingly relevant to study their behavior under knowledge conflicts. Thus far, the role of the source of the retrieved information has gone unexamined. We address this gap with a novel framework to investigate how source preferences affect LLM resolution of inter-context knowledge conflicts in English, motivated by interdisciplinary research on credibility. With a comprehensive, tightly-controlled evaluation of 13 open-weight LLMs, we find that LLMs prefer institutionally-corroborated information (e.g., government or newspaper sources) over information from people and social media. However, these source preferences can be reversed by simply repeating information from less credible sources. To mitigate repetition effects and maintain consistent preferences, we propose a novel method that reduces repetition bias by up to 99.8%, while also maintaining at least 88.8% of original preferences. We release all data and code to encourage future work on credibility and source preferences in knowledge-intensive NLP.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) incorporates external knowledge into large language models (LLMs), improving their adaptability to downstream tasks and enabling information updates. Surprisingly, recent empirical evidence demonstrates that injecting noise into retrieved relevant documents paradoxically facilitates exploitation of external knowledge and improves generation quality. Although counterintuitive and challenging to apply in practice, this phenomenon enables granular control and rigorous analysis of how LLMs integrate external knowledge. Therefore, in this paper, we intervene on noise injection and establish a layer-specific functional demarcation within the LLM: shallow layers specialize in local context modeling, intermediate layers focus on integrating long-range external factual knowledge, and deeper layers primarily rely on parametric internal knowledge. Building on this insight, we propose Layer Fused Decoding (LFD), a simple decoding strategy that directly combines representations from an intermediate layer with final-layer decoding outputs to fully exploit the external factual knowledge. To identify the optimal intermediate layer, we introduce an internal knowledge score (IKS) criterion that selects the layer with the lowest IKS value in the latter half of layers. Experimental results across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that LFD helps RAG systems more effectively surface retrieved context knowledge with minimal cost.

Climate change is a major socio-scientific issue shapes public decision-making and policy discussions. As large language models (LLMs) increasingly serve as an interface for accessing climate knowledge, whether existing benchmarks reflect user needs is critical for evaluating LLM in real-world settings. We propose a Proactive Knowledge Behaviors Framework that captures the different human-human and human-AI knowledge seeking and provision behaviors. We further develop a Topic-Intent-Form taxonomy and apply it to analyze climate-related data representing different knowledge behaviors. Our results reveal a substantial mismatch between current benchmarks and real-world user needs, while knowledge interaction patterns between humans and LLMs closely resemble those in human-human interactions. These findings provide actionable guidance for benchmark design, RAG system development, and LLM training. Code is available at https://github.com/OuchengLiu/LLM-Misalign-Climate-Change.

Even for a conservative estimate, 80% of enterprise data reside in unstructured files, stored in data lakes that accommodate heterogeneous formats. Classical search engines can no longer meet information seeking needs, especially when the task is to browse and explore for insight formulation. In other words, there are no obvious search keywords to use. Knowledge graphs, due to their natural visual appeals that reduce the human cognitive load, become the winning candidate for heterogeneous data integration and knowledge representation. In this paper, we introduce Docs2KG, a novel framework designed to extract multimodal information from diverse and heterogeneous unstructured documents, including emails, web pages, PDF files, and Excel files. Dynamically generates a unified knowledge graph that represents the extracted key information, Docs2KG enables efficient querying and exploration of document data lakes. Unlike existing approaches that focus on domain-specific data sources or pre-designed schemas, Docs2KG offers a flexible and extensible solution that can adapt to various document structures and content types. The proposed framework unifies data processing supporting a multitude of downstream tasks with improved domain interpretability. Docs2KG is publicly accessible at https://docs2kg.ai4wa.com, and a demonstration video is available at https://docs2kg.ai4wa.com/Video.

While knowledge is managed through Wikipedia and software through GitHub, agent skills still lack an infrastructure for large-scale production, governance, and evolution. SkillWiki is a living knowledge infrastructure that supports the organization, grounding, and continuous evolution of agent skills by transforming heterogeneous knowledge into reusable skill assets linked to their originating evidence. Our demonstration presents the complete skill lifecycle, from knowledge ingestion and skill production to provenance-aware exploration, governance, and execution-driven evolution. SkillWiki highlights a future in which knowledge, skills, and execution experience co-evolve within a shared infrastructure. The live demonstration and source code are publicly available at https://github.com/Huangdingcheng/SkillWiki.

External knowledge (a.k.a. side information) plays a critical role in zero-shot learning (ZSL) which aims to predict with unseen classes that have never appeared in training data. Several kinds of external knowledge, such as text and attribute, have been widely investigated, but they alone are limited with incomplete semantics. Some very recent studies thus propose to use Knowledge Graph (KG) due to its high expressivity and compatibility for representing kinds of knowledge. However, the ZSL community is still in short of standard benchmarks for studying and comparing different external knowledge settings and different KG-based ZSL methods. In this paper, we proposed six resources covering three tasks, i.e., zero-shot image classification (ZS-IMGC), zero-shot relation extraction (ZS-RE), and zero-shot KG completion (ZS-KGC). Each resource has a normal ZSL benchmark and a KG containing semantics ranging from text to attribute, from relational knowledge to logical expressions. We have clearly presented these resources including their construction, statistics, data formats and usage cases w.r.t. different ZSL methods. More importantly, we have conducted a comprehensive benchmarking study, with two general and state-of-the-art methods, two setting-specific methods and one interpretable method. We discussed and compared different ZSL paradigms w.r.t. different external knowledge settings, and found that our resources have great potential for developing more advanced ZSL methods and more solutions for applying KGs for augmenting machine learning. All the resources are available at https://github.com/China-UK-ZSL/Resources_for_KZSL.

Finding relevant literature underpins the practice of evidence-based medicine. From 2014 to 2016, TREC conducted a clinical decision support track, wherein participants were tasked with finding articles relevant to clinical questions posed by physicians. In total, 87 teams have participated over the past three years, generating 395 runs. During this period, each team has trialled a variety of methods. While there was significant overlap in the methods employed by different teams, the results were varied. Due to the diversity of the platforms used, the results arising from the different techniques are not directly comparable, reducing the ability to build on previous work. By using a stable platform, we have been able to compare different document and query processing techniques, allowing us to experiment with different search parameters. We have used our system to reproduce leading teams runs, and compare the results obtained. By benchmarking our indexing and search techniques, we can statistically test a variety of hypotheses, paving the way for further research.

Knowledge graphs (KGs) are widely used to inject prior knowledge into reinforcement learning (RL), yet the literature is dominated by single-domain, positive-result method papers, so we lack a systematic account of when KG structure helps an agent, when it is neutral, and when it hurts. We conduct a controlled study that independently varies the RL task, the injection mechanism (state features, action masking, or potential-based reward shaping), and KG quality. Using a synthetic, fully controllable KG over MiniGrid environments, we report three findings. First, on compositional sparse-reward tasks structured KG guidance improves sample efficiency and solve reliability (70% to 97% of seeds), and a shuffle control that permutes the KG's edges while preserving their count collapses the benefit toward baseline (masking p=0.0001; shaping p=0.006), so the gain is structural rather than generic regularization. Second, KG value scales with the amount of task-relevant knowledge the graph contains. Third, and most consequential, safety depends on the mechanism: soft, optimality-preserving injection benefits from correct knowledge and harmlessly ignores incorrect knowledge, whereas hard masking is brittle, forbidding essential actions when the KG is incomplete or corrupted and making a wrong KG worse than none. A UMLS-derived clinical case study on sepsis management under offline RL is a careful null, underscoring that benefits require task structure the chosen mechanism can exploit. Our results give practitioners concrete guidance on how, and how much, to trust a KG when using it to guide RL.

The integration of large language models (LLMs) and search engines represents a significant evolution in knowledge acquisition methodologies. However, determining the knowledge that an LLM already possesses and the knowledge that requires the help of a search engine remains an unresolved issue. Most existing methods solve this problem through the results of preliminary answers or reasoning done by the LLM itself, but this incurs excessively high computational costs. This paper introduces a novel collaborative approach, namely SlimPLM, that detects missing knowledge in LLMs with a slim proxy model, to enhance the LLM's knowledge acquisition process. We employ a proxy model which has far fewer parameters, and take its answers as heuristic answers. Heuristic answers are then utilized to predict the knowledge required to answer the user question, as well as the known and unknown knowledge within the LLM. We only conduct retrieval for the missing knowledge in questions that the LLM does not know. Extensive experimental results on five datasets with two LLMs demonstrate a notable improvement in the end-to-end performance of LLMs in question-answering tasks, achieving or surpassing current state-of-the-art models with lower LLM inference costs.

The rapid expansion of medical literature presents growing challenges for structuring and integrating domain knowledge at scale. Knowledge Graphs (KGs) offer a promising solution by enabling efficient retrieval, automated reasoning, and knowledge discovery. However, current KG construction methods often rely on supervised pipelines with limited generalizability or naively aggregate outputs from Large Language Models (LLMs), treating biomedical corpora as static and ignoring the temporal dynamics and contextual uncertainty of evolving knowledge. To address these limitations, we introduce MedKGent, a LLM agent framework for constructing temporally evolving medical KGs. Leveraging over 10 million PubMed abstracts published between 1975 and 2023, we simulate the emergence of biomedical knowledge via a fine-grained daily time series. MedKGent incrementally builds the KG in a day-by-day manner using two specialized agents powered by the Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct model. The Extractor Agent identifies knowledge triples and assigns confidence scores via sampling-based estimation, which are used to filter low-confidence extractions and inform downstream processing. The Constructor Agent incrementally integrates the retained triples into a temporally evolving graph, guided by confidence scores and timestamps to reinforce recurring knowledge and resolve conflicts. The resulting KG contains 156,275 entities and 2,971,384 relational triples. Quality assessments by two SOTA LLMs and three domain experts demonstrate an accuracy approaching 90%, with strong inter-rater agreement. To evaluate downstream utility, we conduct RAG across seven medical question answering benchmarks using five leading LLMs, consistently observing significant improvements over non-augmented baselines. Case studies further demonstrate the KG's value in literature-based drug repurposing via confidence-aware causal inference.

Large language models (LLMs) have majorly advanced NLP and AI, and next to their ability to perform a wide range of procedural tasks, a major success factor is their internalized factual knowledge. Since Petroni et al. (2019), analyzing this knowledge has gained attention. However, most approaches investigate one question at a time via modest-sized pre-defined samples, introducing an ``availability bias'' (Tversky&Kahnemann, 1973) that prevents the analysis of knowledge (or beliefs) of LLMs beyond the experimenter's predisposition. To address this challenge, we propose a novel methodology to comprehensively materialize an LLM's factual knowledge through recursive querying and result consolidation. Our approach is a milestone for LLM research, for the first time providing constructive insights into the scope and structure of LLM knowledge (or beliefs). As a prototype, we build GPTKB, a knowledge base (KB) comprising 101 million relational triples for over 2.9 million entities from GPT-4o-mini. We use GPTKB to exemplarily analyze GPT-4o-mini's factual knowledge in terms of scale, accuracy, bias, cutoff and consistency, at the same time. GPTKB is accessible at https://gptkb.org

Unified multimodal models (UMMs) receive image-generation supervision that exposes them to visual information not fully documented in text. Can learning to generate images expand what pretrained models know? We introduce Knowledge Transfer Probing (KTP), a controlled protocol that supplies new knowledge through image-generation training and tests its accessibility through text-only question answering. Across seven knowledge categories and three UMMs, we observe direct but uneven transfer from visual supervision to language. Motivated by these observations, we successively introduce Textual Alignment and Interleaved Image--Text Alignment, which connect generation and answering through shared knowledge and interleaved responses, respectively. Guidance on selected entities can improve knowledge access on other entities without QA supervision, with additional gains from interleaved alignment. Further analysis shows that knowledge correctly reproduced in images is often more accessible through text, although substantial gaps remain between the two forms of access. These findings support visual generation as a source of knowledge beyond textual supervision, and motivate joint investigation of training data design and model architecture to make this knowledge more broadly accessible.

Task-oriented dialog (TOD) systems typically manage structured knowledge (e.g. ontologies and databases) to guide the goal-oriented conversations. However, they fall short of handling dialog turns grounded on unstructured knowledge (e.g. reviews and documents). In this paper, we formulate a task of modeling TOD grounded on both structured and unstructured knowledge. To address this task, we propose a TOD system with hybrid knowledge management, HyKnow. It extends the belief state to manage both structured and unstructured knowledge, and is the first end-to-end model that jointly optimizes dialog modeling grounded on these two kinds of knowledge. We conduct experiments on the modified version of MultiWOZ 2.1 dataset, where dialogs are grounded on hybrid knowledge. Experimental results show that HyKnow has strong end-to-end performance compared to existing TOD systems. It also outperforms the pipeline knowledge management schemes, with higher unstructured knowledge retrieval accuracy.

The global economy is increasingly dependent on knowledge workers to meet the needs of public and private organizations. While there is no single definition of knowledge work, organizations and industry groups still attempt to measure individuals' capability to engage in it. The most comprehensive assessment of capability readiness for professional knowledge workers is the Uniform CPA Examination developed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). In this paper, we experimentally evaluate OpenAI's `text-davinci-003` and prior versions of GPT on both a sample Regulation (REG) exam and an assessment of over 200 multiple-choice questions based on the AICPA Blueprints for legal, financial, accounting, technology, and ethical tasks. First, we find that `text-davinci-003` achieves a correct rate of 14.4% on a sample REG exam section, significantly underperforming human capabilities on quantitative reasoning in zero-shot prompts. Second, `text-davinci-003` appears to be approaching human-level performance on the Remembering & Understanding and Application skill levels in the Exam absent calculation. For best prompt and parameters, the model answers 57.6% of questions correctly, significantly better than the 25% guessing rate, and its top two answers are correct 82.1% of the time, indicating strong non-entailment. Finally, we find that recent generations of GPT-3 demonstrate material improvements on this assessment, rising from 30% for `text-davinci-001` to 57% for `text-davinci-003`. These findings strongly suggest that large language models have the potential to transform the quality and efficiency of future knowledge work.