# Knowledge Conflicts for LLMs: A Survey

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.08319 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08319/

## Key facts

- Cited by 283 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 142 of its 201 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 142)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04761/) (2023)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [Pointer Sentinel Mixture Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.07843/) (2016)
- [TruthfulQA: Measuring How Models Mimic Human Falsehoods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07958/) (2021)
- [TriviaQA: A Large Scale Distantly Supervised Challenge Dataset for Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03551/) (2017)
- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [Locating and Editing Factual Associations in GPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05262/) (2022)
- [A Broad-Coverage Challenge Corpus for Sentence Understanding through Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05426/) (2017)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10997/) (2023)
- [BoolQ: Exploring the Surprising Difficulty of Natural Yes/No Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10044/) (2019)
- [REALM: Retrieval-Augmented Language Model Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08909/) (2020)
- [Language Models as Knowledge Bases?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01066/) (2019)
- [Large Language Models Encode Clinical Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.13138/) (2022)
- [Know What You Don't Know: Unanswerable Questions for SQuAD](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03822/) (2018)
- [Video-LLaMA: An Instruction-tuned Audio-Visual Language Model for Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02858/) (2023)
- [Inference-Time Intervention: Eliciting Truthful Answers from a Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03341/) (2023)
- [Hierarchical Neural Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04833/) (2018)
- [When Not to Trust Language Models: Investigating Effectiveness of Parametric and Non-Parametric Memories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10511/) (2022)
- [Language Models Don't Always Say What They Think: Unfaithful Explanations in Chain-of-Thought Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04388/) (2023)
- [LIMA: Less Is More for Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11206/) (2023)
- [BERT Rediscovers the Classical NLP Pipeline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05950/) (2019)
- [Teaching Machines to Read and Comprehend](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03340/) (2015)
- [Towards Understanding Sycophancy in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13548/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 283)

- [From System 1 to System 2: A Survey of Reasoning Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17419/) (2025)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Graphs (GraphRAG)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00309/) (2024)
- [Know Your Limits: A Survey of Abstention in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18418/) (2024)
- [ReDeEP: Detecting Hallucination in Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Mechanistic Interpretability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11414/) (2024)
- [Flooding Spread of Manipulated Knowledge in LLM-Based Multi-Agent Communities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07791/) (2024)
- [SealQA: Raising the Bar for Reasoning in Search-Augmented Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01062/) (2025)
- [On the Role of Attention Heads in Large Language Model Safety](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13708/) (2024)
- [Steering Knowledge Selection Behaviours in LLMs via SAE-Based Representation Engineering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15999/) (2024)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Conflicting Evidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13079/) (2025)
- [Astute RAG: Overcoming Imperfect Retrieval Augmentation and Knowledge Conflicts for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07176/) (2024)
- [Knowledge Mechanisms in Large Language Models: A Survey and Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15017/) (2024)
- [Injecting Domain-Specific Knowledge into Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10708/) (2025)
- [Context-DPO: Aligning Language Models for Context-Faithfulness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15280/) (2024)
- [LLM-based Agents Suffer from Hallucinations: A Survey of Taxonomy, Methods, and Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18970/) (2025)
- [STALE: Can LLM Agents Know When Their Memories Are No Longer Valid?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.06527/) (2026)
- [Massive Values in Self-Attention Modules are the Key to Contextual Knowledge Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01563/) (2025)
- [Parameters vs. Context: Fine-Grained Control of Knowledge Reliance in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15888/) (2025)
- [IRCAN: Mitigating Knowledge Conflicts in LLM Generation via Identifying and Reweighting Context-Aware Neurons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18406/) (2024)
- [Insight Over Sight: Exploring the Vision-Knowledge Conflicts in Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08145/) (2024)
- [Rethinking Memory in LLM based Agents: Representations, Operations, and Emerging Topics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00675/) (2025)
- [Sharing Matters: Analysing Neurons Across Languages and Tasks in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09265/) (2024)
- [Curie: Toward Rigorous and Automated Scientific Experimentation with AI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16069/) (2025)
- [Long2RAG: Evaluating Long-Context & Long-Form Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Key Point Recall](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23000/) (2024)
- [SafeRAG: Benchmarking Security in Retrieval-Augmented Generation of Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.18636/) (2025)
- [Taming Knowledge Conflicts in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10996/) (2025)
- [Probing-RAG: Self-Probing to Guide Language Models in Selective Document Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13339/) (2024)
- [Unraveling Cross-Modality Knowledge Conflicts in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03659/) (2024)
- [FaithfulRAG: Fact-Level Conflict Modeling for Context-Faithful Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08938/) (2025)
- [Studying Large Language Model Behaviors Under Context-Memory Conflicts With Real Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16032/) (2024)
- [DRAGged into Conflicts: Detecting and Addressing Conflicting Sources in Search-Augmented LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08500/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This survey provides an in-depth analysis of knowledge conflicts for large language models (LLMs), highlighting the complex challenges they encounter when blending contextual and parametric knowledge. Our focus is on three categories of knowledge conflicts: context-memory, inter-context, and intra-memory conflict. These conflicts can significantly impact the trustworthiness and performance of LLMs, especially in real-world applications where noise and misinformation are common. By categorizing these conflicts, exploring the causes, examining the behaviors of LLMs under such conflicts, and reviewing available solutions, this survey aims to shed light on strategies for improving the robustness of LLMs, thereby serving as a valuable resource for advancing research in this evolving area.