# LLMs as Repositories of Factual Knowledge: Limitations and Solutions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.12774 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12774/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Jan 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Mistral 7B](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06825/) (2023)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [Locating and Editing Factual Associations in GPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05262/) (2022)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10997/) (2023)
- [BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05100/) (2022)
- [Mixtral of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04088/) (2024)
- [When Not to Trust Language Models: Investigating Effectiveness of Parametric and Non-Parametric Memories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10511/) (2022)
- [Mass-Editing Memory in a Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07229/) (2022)
- [OLMo: Accelerating the Science of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00838/) (2024)
- [The Falcon Series of Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16867/) (2023)
- [Dissecting Recall of Factual Associations in Auto-Regressive Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14767/) (2023)
- [Fast Model Editing at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11309/) (2021)
- [Dolma: an Open Corpus of Three Trillion Tokens for Language Model Pretraining Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00159/) (2024)
- [Memory-Based Model Editing at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06520/) (2022)
- [Editing Large Language Models: Problems, Methods, and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13172/) (2023)
- [Time-Aware Language Models as Temporal Knowledge Bases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15110/) (2021)
- [Can We Edit Factual Knowledge by In-Context Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12740/) (2023)
- [The Power of Noise: Redefining Retrieval for RAG Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14887/) (2024)
- [RealTime QA: What's the Answer Right Now?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.13332/) (2022)
- [Does Localization Inform Editing? Surprising Differences in Causality-Based Localization vs. Knowledge Editing in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04213/) (2023)
- [Evaluating the Ripple Effects of Knowledge Editing in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12976/) (2023)
- [Leak, Cheat, Repeat: Data Contamination and Evaluation Malpractices in Closed-Source LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03927/) (2024)
- [Head-to-Tail: How Knowledgeable are Large Language Models (LLMs)? A.K.A. Will LLMs Replace Knowledge Graphs?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10168/) (2023)
- [A Dataset for Answering Time-Sensitive Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06314/) (2021)
- [TemporalWiki: A Lifelong Benchmark for Training and Evaluating Ever-Evolving Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14211/) (2022)
- [Crawling the Internal Knowledge-Base of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12810/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Does Time Have Its Place? Temporal Heads: Where Language Models Recall Time-specific Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14258/) (2025)
- [[De|Re]constructing VLMs' Reasoning in Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19555/) (2025)
- [Garbage In, Reasoning Out? Why Benchmark Scores are Unreliable and What to Do About It](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23864/) (2025)
- [ACE: Attribution-Controlled Knowledge Editing for Multi-hop Factual Recall](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.07896/) (2025)
- [What Does Loss Optimization Actually Teach, If Anything? Knowledge Dynamics in Continual Pre-training of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03858/) (2026)
- [Higher-Order Knowledge Representations for Agentic Scientific Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04878/) (2026)
- [Breaking Validity-Induced Boundaries to Expand Algorithm Search Space: A Two-Stage AST-Based Operator for LLM-Driven Automated Heuristic Evolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.16420/) (2026)
- [Latent Knowledge as a Predictor of Fact Acquisition in Fine-Tuned Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.18468/) (2026)
- [V-DyKnow: A Dynamic Benchmark for Time-Sensitive Knowledge in Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16581/) (2026)
- [Rethinking Retrieval-Augmentation as Synthesis: A Query-Aware Context Merging Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.20286/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

LLMs' sources of knowledge are data snapshots containing factual information about entities collected at different timestamps and from different media types (e.g. wikis, social media, etc.). Such unstructured knowledge is subject to change due to updates through time from past to present. Equally important are the inconsistencies and inaccuracies occurring in different information sources. Consequently, the model's knowledge about an entity may be perturbed while training over the sequence of snapshots or at inference time, resulting in inconsistent and inaccurate model performance. In this work, we study the appropriateness of Large Language Models (LLMs) as repositories of factual knowledge. We consider twenty-four state-of-the-art LLMs that are either closed-, partially (weights), or fully (weight and training data) open-source. We evaluate their reliability in responding to time-sensitive factual questions in terms of accuracy and consistency when prompts are perturbed. We further evaluate the effectiveness of state-of-the-art methods to improve LLMs' accuracy and consistency. We then propose ENtity-Aware Fine-tuning (ENAF), a soft neurosymbolic approach aimed at providing structured representation of entities during fine-tuning to reduce inconsistencies and improve response stability under prompt variations.