# Knowledge Dependency Estimation for Reliable Question Answering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.28047 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28047/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03300/) (2020)
- [A Unified Approach to Interpreting Model Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07874/) (2017)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09600/) (2018)
- [TruthfulQA: Measuring How Models Mimic Human Falsehoods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07958/) (2021)
- [Locating and Editing Factual Associations in GPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05262/) (2022)
- [Language Models (Mostly) Know What They Know](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05221/) (2022)
- [A Survey on LLM-as-a-Judge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15594/) (2024)
- [What Disease does this Patient Have? A Large-scale Open Domain Question Answering Dataset from Medical Exams](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13081/) (2020)
- [Atlas: Few-shot Learning with Retrieval Augmented Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03299/) (2022)
- [Teaching Models to Express Their Uncertainty in Words](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14334/) (2022)
- [Towards Faithfully Interpretable NLP Systems: How should we define and evaluate faithfulness?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.03685/) (2020)
- [ERASER: A Benchmark to Evaluate Rationalized NLP Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03429/) (2019)
- [Learning the Difference that Makes a Difference with Counterfactually-Augmented Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12434/) (2019)
- [Semantic Entropy Probes: Robust and Cheap Hallucination Detection in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15927/) (2024)
- [Understanding Neural Networks through Representation Erasure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08220/) (2016)
- [Explaining by Removing: A Unified Framework for Model Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14878/) (2020)
- [Asymmetric Shapley values: incorporating causal knowledge into model-agnostic explainability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06358/) (2019)
- [Are self-explanations from Large Language Models faithful?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.07927/) (2024)
- [Iterative Amortized Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.09356/) (2018)
- [Detecting Statistical Interactions from Neural Network Weights](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.04977/) (2017)
- [Do Not Design, Learn: A Trainable Scoring Function for Uncertainty Estimation in Generative LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11278/) (2024)
- [AttriBoT: A Bag of Tricks for Efficiently Approximating Leave-One-Out Context Attribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15102/) (2024)
- [Can LLMs Evaluate Complex Attribution in QA? Automatic Benchmarking using Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14640/) (2024)
- [GenDec: A robust generative Question-decomposition method for Multi-hop reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11166/) (2024)
- [Source Attribution in Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04480/) (2025)
- [Semantic Reformulation Entropy for Robust Hallucination Detection in QA Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17445/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Reliable question answering requires identifying not only whether an answer is correct, but also which available knowledge the prediction depends on. In realistic LLM-based QA, this knowledge may come from context, retrieval, decomposition, or intermediate reasoning, forming a noisy and redundant candidate space rather than a clean gold evidence set. We study knowledge dependency estimation: estimating the sensitivity of a fixed black-box QA model to different candidate knowledge units. The challenge is to obtain fine-grained dependency scores without exhaustive test-time perturbation while modeling redundancy, substitutability, and complementarity. We propose Knot, a structured rank-aware knowledge dependency estimator. Knot learns from subset-level counterfactual supervision, models subset sensitivity through coverage over latent dependency factors, and derives rank-aware unit scores to identify influential candidates. Across multiple-choice and generative QA benchmarks, Knot outperforms all compared baselines in subset-sensitivity prediction and produces more faithful unit rankings than deployable baselines without extra QA-model calls; when used for practical risk screening, its dependency scores help flag error-prone QA predictions early.