Factual Recall
Factual recall in large language models (LLMs) focuses on understanding how these models access and utilize stored knowledge to answer questions accurately, particularly concerning time-sensitive information and complex relationships. Current research investigates the internal mechanisms of factual recall within transformer-based architectures, exploring how attention mechanisms, feed-forward networks, and knowledge neurons contribute to both successful and erroneous responses. This research is crucial for improving the reliability and accuracy of LLMs across various applications, from question answering systems to medical diagnosis support, by identifying and mitigating issues like hallucinations and over-generalization. A key challenge is bridging the gap between simply recalling facts and integrating them effectively with contextual information to produce accurate and nuanced responses.
Papers
Fact Recall, Heuristics or Pure Guesswork? Precise Interpretations of Language Models for Fact Completion
Denitsa Saynova, Lovisa Hagström, Moa Johansson, Richard Johansson, Marco Kuhlmann
How Do Multilingual Models Remember? Investigating Multilingual Factual Recall Mechanisms
Constanza Fierro, Negar Foroutan, Desmond Elliott, Anders Søgaard