Large Language Models with Controllable Working Memory
Not on the map. Why?
Cited by 38 in Retrieval-augmented generation, but placed by its own abstract, which didn’t fit.
Abstract (arXiv)
Large language models (LLMs) have led to a series of breakthroughs in natural language processing (NLP), owing to their excellent understanding and generation abilities. Remarkably, what further sets these models apart is the massive amounts of world knowledge they internalize during pretraining. While many downstream applications provide the model with an informational context to aid its performance on the underlying task, how the model's world knowledge interacts with the factual information presented in the context remains under explored. As a desirable behavior, an LLM should give precedence to the context whenever it contains task-relevant information that conflicts with the model's memorized knowledge. This enables model predictions to be grounded in the context, which can then be used to update or correct specific model predictions without frequent retraining. By contrast, when the context is irrelevant to the task, the model should ignore it and fall back on its internal knowledge. In this paper, we undertake a first joint study of the aforementioned two properties, namely controllability and robustness, in the context of LLMs. We demonstrate that state-of-the-art T5 and PaLM (both pretrained and finetuned) could exhibit poor controllability and robustness, which do not scale with increasing model size. As a solution, we propose a novel method - Knowledge Aware FineTuning (KAFT) - to strengthen both controllability and robustness by incorporating counterfactual and irrelevant contexts to standard supervised datasets. Our comprehensive evaluation showcases the utility of KAFT across model architectures and sizes.
Key facts. Cited by 169 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 30 of its 51 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 9 Nov 2022.
Builds on
30 of 51 references.
References · 30
- 2017Attention Is All You Needcited by 59,932
- 2018BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understandingcited by 40,204
- 2020Language Models are Few-Shot Learnerscited by 32,199
- 2019Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformercited by 14,491
- 2022Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidancecited by 5,717
- 2022PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathwayscited by 5,304
- 2017TriviaQA: A Large Scale Distantly Supervised Challenge Dataset for Reading Comprehensioncited by 2,895
- 2020REALM: Retrieval-Augmented Language Model Pre-Trainingcited by 2,126
- 2019Language Models as Knowledge Bases?cited by 1,922
- 2018Know What You Don't Know: Unanswerable Questions for SQuADcited by 1,538
- 2020Transformer Feed-Forward Layers Are Key-Value Memoriescited by 1,307
- 2021Scaling Language Models: Methods, Analysis & Insights from Training Gophercited by 1,199
18 more
- 2022Mass-Editing Memory in a Transformercited by 976
- 2020How Much Knowledge Can You Pack Into the Parameters of a Language Model?cited by 713
- 2022Using DeepSpeed and Megatron to Train Megatron-Turing NLG 530B, A Large-Scale Generative Language Modelcited by 557
- 2021Editing Factual Knowledge in Language Modelscited by 548
- 2021Fast Model Editing at Scalecited by 491
- 2020UnifiedQA: Crossing Format Boundaries With a Single QA Systemcited by 475
- 2021Entity-Based Knowledge Conflicts in Question Answeringcited by 349
- 2021Time-Aware Language Models as Temporal Knowledge Basescited by 290
- 2019QASC: A Dataset for Question Answering via Sentence Compositioncited by 248
- 2019Negated and Misprimed Probes for Pretrained Language Models: Birds Can Talk, But Cannot Flycited by 240
- 2021Mind the Gap: Assessing Temporal Generalization in Neural Language Modelscited by 226
- 2020Modifying Memories in Transformer Modelscited by 222
- 2020How Context Affects Language Models' Factual Predictionscited by 181
- 2021Towards Continual Knowledge Learning of Language Modelscited by 172
- 2022UnifiedQA-v2: Stronger Generalization via Broader Cross-Format Trainingcited by 57
- 2022Entity Cloze By Date: What LMs Know About Unseen Entitiescited by 55
- 2022A Causal Lens for Controllable Text Generationcited by 45
- 2020Contextualized Representations Using Textual Encyclopedic Knowledgecited by 17
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Citing papers per year: 2022: 1; 2023: 34; 2024: 81; 2025: 36; 2026: 17.
169 papers.
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- 2026Navigating Unreliable Parametric and Contextual Knowledge: Explicit Knowledge Conflict Resolution for LLM Inference18 Jun 2026
- 2026From Context-Aware to Conflict-Aware: Generalizing Contrastive Decoding for Knowledge Conflict in LLMs9 Jun 2026
- 2026Mitigating Context-Memory Conflicts in LLMs through Dynamic Cognitive Reconciliation Decoding12 May 2026
- 2026Attractor Geometry of Transformer Memory: From Conflict Arbitration to Confident Hallucination7 May 2026
- 2026Hallucinations Undermine Trust; Metacognition is a Way Forward2 May 2026
- 2026Probing for Knowledge Attribution in Large Language Models26 Feb 2026
- 2026Evolutionary Context Search for Automated Skill Acquisition18 Feb 2026
- 2026REAL: Resolving Knowledge Conflicts in Knowledge-Intensive Visual Question Answering via Reasoning-Pivot Alignment15 Feb 2026
- 2026Interpretability in Deep Time Series Models Demands Semantic Alignment2 Feb 2026
- 2025HealthContradict: Evaluating Biomedical Knowledge Conflicts in Language Models2 Dec 2025
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