# Structural Entropy Guided Agent for Detecting and Repairing Knowledge Deficiencies in LLMs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.07184 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.07184/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Web, search, and research agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 21 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 May 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Web, search, and research agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/web-search-and-research-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Qwen2.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15115/) (2024)
- [Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08073/) (2022)
- [Qwen2 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10671/) (2024)
- [Does Reinforcement Learning Really Incentivize Reasoning Capacity in LLMs Beyond the Base Model?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13837/) (2025)
- [Baichuan 2: Open Large-scale Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10305/) (2023)
- [Principle-Driven Self-Alignment of Language Models from Scratch with Minimal Human Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03047/) (2023)
- [Quiet-STaR: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Think Before Speaking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09629/) (2024)
- [MedAlpaca -- An Open-Source Collection of Medical Conversational AI Models and Training Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08247/) (2023)
- [Self-Alignment with Instruction Backtranslation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06259/) (2023)
- [Investigating the Factual Knowledge Boundary of Large Language Models with Retrieval Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11019/) (2023)
- [R-Tuning: Instructing Large Language Models to Say `I Don't Know'](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09677/) (2023)
- [HuatuoGPT-II, One-stage Training for Medical Adaption of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09774/) (2023)
- [Unfamiliar Finetuning Examples Control How Language Models Hallucinate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05612/) (2024)
- [Alignment for Honesty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07000/) (2023)
- [Synthetic Data Generation & Multi-Step RL for Reasoning & Tool Use](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04736/) (2025)
- [Human-Instruction-Free LLM Self-Alignment with Limited Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06785/) (2024)
- [Beyond IID: Optimizing Instruction Learning from the Perspective of Instruction Interaction and Dependency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07045/) (2024)
- [Discovering Knowledge Deficiencies of Language Models on Massive Knowledge Base](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23361/) (2025)
- [SetKE: Knowledge Editing for Knowledge Elements Overlap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.20972/) (2025)
- [Diagnosing and Remedying Knowledge Deficiencies in LLMs via Label-free Curricular Meaningful Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11431/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [AutoTIR: Autonomous Tools Integrated Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21836/) (2025)
- [Towards Compositional Generalization of LLMs via Skill Taxonomy Guided Data Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03676/) (2026)
- [Ontology-Constrained Neural Reasoning in Enterprise Agentic Systems: A Neurosymbolic Architecture for Domain-Grounded AI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.00555/) (2026)
- [MedCoG: Maximizing LLM Inference Density in Medical Reasoning via Meta-Cognitive Regulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.07905/) (2026)
- [When LLM Meets Tree Search: A Systematic View of Inference as Search in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.30395/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved unprecedented performance by leveraging vast pretraining corpora, yet their performance remains suboptimal in knowledge-intensive domains such as medicine and scientific research, where high factual precision is required. While synthetic data provides a promising avenue for augmenting domain knowledge, existing methods frequently generate redundant samples that do not align with the model's true knowledge gaps. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel Structural Entropy-guided Knowledge Navigator (SENATOR) framework that addresses the intrinsic knowledge deficiencies of LLMs. Our approach employs the Structure Entropy (SE) metric to quantify uncertainty along knowledge graph paths and leverages Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to selectively explore regions where the model lacks domain-specific knowledge. Guided by these insights, the framework generates targeted synthetic data for supervised fine-tuning, enabling continuous self-improvement. Experimental results on LLaMA-3 and Qwen2 across multiple domain-specific benchmarks show that SENATOR effectively detects and repairs knowledge deficiencies, achieving notable performance improvements. The code and data for our methods and experiments are available at https://github.com/weiyifan1023/senator.