# SCoNE: Selective Context-aware Neuron Editing for Robust Retrieval-Augmented Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.00689 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.00689/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in RAG robustness and adaptive retrieval, one of 15 directions in Retrieval-augmented generation.
- Builds on 26 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Sep 2026.

## Placed in

- Retrieval-augmented generation / [RAG robustness and adaptive retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/rag/rag-robustness-and-adaptive-retrieval/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Think you have Solved Question Answering? Try ARC, the AI2 Reasoning Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05457/) (2018)
- [HellaSwag: Can a Machine Really Finish Your Sentence?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07830/) (2019)
- [HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09600/) (2018)
- [Axiomatic Attribution for Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01365/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Locating and Editing Factual Associations in GPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05262/) (2022)
- [Self-RAG: Learning to Retrieve, Generate, and Critique through Self-Reflection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11511/) (2023)
- [Transformer Feed-Forward Layers Are Key-Value Memories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.14913/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Large Language Models Can Be Easily Distracted by Irrelevant Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00093/) (2023)
- [Crowdsourcing Multiple Choice Science Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06209/) (2017)
- [KILT: a Benchmark for Knowledge Intensive Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.02252/) (2020)
- [Making Retrieval-Augmented Language Models Robust to Irrelevant Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01558/) (2023)
- [Trusting Your Evidence: Hallucinate Less with Context-aware Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14739/) (2023)
- [The Power of Noise: Redefining Retrieval for RAG Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14887/) (2024)
- [ASQA: Factoid Questions Meet Long-Form Answers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06092/) (2022)
- [SPLADE-v3: New baselines for SPLADE](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06789/) (2024)
- [IRCAN: Mitigating Knowledge Conflicts in LLM Generation via Identifying and Reweighting Context-Aware Neurons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18406/) (2024)
- [PA-RAG: RAG Alignment via Multi-Perspective Preference Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14510/) (2024)
- [iQUEST: An Iterative Question-Guided Framework for Knowledge Base Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01784/) (2025)
- [HyperRAG: Enhancing Quality-Efficiency Tradeoffs in Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Reranker KV-Cache Reuse](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02921/) (2025)
- [Sentinel: Decoding Context Utilization via Attention Probing for Efficient LLM Context Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23277/) (2025)
- [Learning to Extract Rational Evidence via Reinforcement Learning for Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15586/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is highly sensitive to retrieval noise: when retrieved documents mix informative and irrelevant context, LLMs are easily distracted, leading to hallucinations. To overcome this, we propose SCoNE (Selective Context-aware Neuron Editing), a training-free model editing approach that improves retrieval noise robustness by selectively strengthening context-aware FFN neurons that are identified by both high attribution and high cross-input variability. SCoNE requires only a small number of mining samples, no fine-tuning, and no inference-time overhead. Across various knowledge-intensive question-answering benchmarks and two LLM backbones, SCoNE consistently outperforms competitive baseline methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/HYU-ARK-Lab/SCoNE.