Understanding the Interplay between LLMs' Utilisation of Parametric and Contextual Knowledge: A keynote at ECIR 2025

TL;DR

This paper explores how large language models utilize their embedded parametric knowledge and retrieved contextual information, highlighting conflicts and proposing diagnostic methods to better understand and improve knowledge integration.

Contribution

It introduces new diagnostic tests for revealing knowledge conflicts and analyzes how LLMs effectively incorporate contextual knowledge alongside parametric memory.

Findings

Diagnostic tests can identify conflicts between parametric and contextual knowledge.

Successful contextual knowledge use depends on specific characteristics of the retrieved information.

Understanding knowledge interplay can improve LLM performance on knowledge-intensive tasks.

Abstract

Language Models (LMs) acquire parametric knowledge from their training process, embedding it within their weights. The increasing scalability of LMs, however, poses significant challenges for understanding a model's inner workings and further for updating or correcting this embedded knowledge without the significant cost of retraining. Moreover, when using these language models for knowledge-intensive language understanding tasks, LMs have to integrate relevant context, mitigating their inherent weaknesses, such as incomplete or outdated knowledge. Nevertheless, studies indicate that LMs often ignore the provided context as it can be in conflict with the pre-existing LM's memory learned during pre-training. Conflicting knowledge can also already be present in the LM's parameters, termed intra-memory conflict. This underscores the importance of understanding the interplay between how a language model uses its parametric knowledge and the retrieved contextual knowledge. In this talk, I will aim to shed light on this important issue by presenting our research on evaluating the knowledge present in LMs, diagnostic tests that can reveal knowledge conflicts, as well as on understanding the characteristics of successfully used contextual knowledge.