Knowledge Augmentation for Language Models

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Overview

The field studies how language models can acquire and use information beyond what is already stored in their parameters, especially for changing facts, specialized domains, and multi-step tasks. Common approaches retrieve text or knowledge-graph evidence at inference time, maintain external memories, or inject knowledge through continued pretraining, supervised tuning, adapters, and synthetic data; agents may also decide when to search or use tools. Work increasingly tests not just whether evidence is available but whether models select and integrate it, using knowledge-intensive question answering, long-context, coding, medical, legal, and reasoning benchmarks. A central tension is choosing between retrieval and internalization: added context can be noisy or ignored, while weight updates can be costly and erode general abilities, so the best method depends on model scale, evidence quality, update needs, and compute.

Latest papers

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180 papers18 papers in the last four weeks, up 80% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

Mar 12, 2026

Can Small Language Models Use What They Retrieve? An Empirical Study of Retrieval Utilization Across Model Scale

Retrieval augmented generation RAG is widely deployed to improve factual accuracy in language models yet it remains unclear whether smaller models of size 7B parameters or less can effectively utilize retrieved information. To investigate this question we evaluate five model sizes from 360M to 8B across three architecture families SmolLM2 Qwen2.5 and Llama 3.1 under four retrieval conditions including no retrieval BM25 dense retrieval using E5 large v2 and oracle retrieval where the retrieved passage is guaranteed to contain the answer. We introduce a parametric knowledge split that separates questions a model can already answer from those that require external knowledge which allows us to isolate utilization failure from retrieval quality failure. We find three main results. First even with oracle retrieval models of size 7B or smaller fail to extract the correct answer 85 to 100 percent of the time on questions they cannot answer alone which indicates a fundamental utilization bottleneck. Second adding retrieval context destroys 42 to 100 percent of answers the model previously knew suggesting a distraction effect driven by the presence of context rather than its quality. Third an error analysis of 2588 oracle failures shows that the dominant failure mode is irrelevant generation where the model ignores the provided context entirely. These patterns hold across multiple prompt templates and retrieval methods. The results indicate that for models below 7B parameters the main limitation of RAG is context utilization rather than retrieval quality and that deploying RAG at this scale can lead to a net negative trade off under standard evaluation conditions.

Sanchit Pandey

BITS Pilani, Hyderabad, India · BITS Pilani, Hyderabad Campus, Telangana, India

Retrieval-Augmented GenerationKnowledge Augmentation for Language ModelsRAG EvaluationSmall Language Models
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Mar 10, 2026

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

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.

Isabelle Augenstein

University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Knowledge Conflicts in Language ModelsFactual Knowledge in Language ModelsKnowledge Augmentation for Language Models
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Mar 9, 2026

Gradually Excavating External Knowledge for Implicit Complex Question Answering

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have gained much attention for the emergence of human-comparable capabilities and huge potential. However, for open-domain implicit question-answering problems, LLMs may not be the ultimate solution due to the reasons of: 1) uncovered or out-of-date domain knowledge, 2) one-shot generation and hence restricted comprehensiveness. To this end, this work proposes a gradual knowledge excavation framework for open-domain complex question answering, where LLMs iteratively and actively acquire external information, and then reason based on acquired historical knowledge. Specifically, during each step of the solving process, the model selects an action to execute, such as querying external knowledge or performing a single logical reasoning step, to gradually progress toward a final answer. Our method can effectively leverage plug-and-play external knowledge and dynamically adjust the strategy for solving complex questions. Evaluated on the StrategyQA dataset, our method achieves 78.17% accuracy with less than 6% parameters of its competitors, setting new SOTA for ~10B-scale LLMs.

Chang Liu, Xiaoguang Li, Lifeng Shang +4

The University of Hong Kong · Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab

Iterative RAGQuestion AnsweringKnowledge Augmentation for Language ModelsMulti-Hop QARetrieval-Augmented Generation
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Mar 6, 2026

A Dynamic Self-Evolving Extraction System

The extraction of structured information from raw text is a fundamental component of many NLP applications, including document retrieval, ranking, and relevance estimation. High-quality extractions often require domain-specific accuracy, up-to-date understanding of specialized taxonomies, and the ability to incorporate emerging jargon and rare outliers. In many domains--such as medical, legal, and HR--the extraction model must also adapt to shifting terminology and benefit from explicit reasoning over structured knowledge. We propose DySECT, a Dynamic Self-Evolving Extraction and Curation Toolkit, which continually improves as it is used. The system incrementally populates a versatile, self-expanding knowledge base (KB) with triples extracted by the LLM. The KB further enriches itself through the integration of probabilistic knowledge and graph-based reasoning, gradually accumulating domain concepts and relationships. The enriched KB then feeds back into the LLM extractor via prompt tuning, sampling of relevant few-shot examples, or fine-tuning using KB-derived synthetic data. As a result, the system forms a symbiotic closed-loop cycle in which extraction continuously improves knowledge, and knowledge continuously improves extraction.

Moin Amin-Naseri, Hannah Kim, Estevam Hruschka

Megagon Labs

Document Information ExtractionLLM Information ExtractionKnowledge Augmentation for Language ModelsLanguage Model Self-ImprovementContinual Learning for LLMs
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Mar 5, 2026

Enhancing Zero-shot Commonsense Reasoning by Integrating Visual Knowledge via Machine Imagination

Recent advancements in zero-shot commonsense reasoning have empowered Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) to acquire extensive commonsense knowledge without requiring task-specific fine-tuning. Despite this progress, these models frequently suffer from limitations caused by human reporting biases inherent in textual knowledge, leading to understanding discrepancies between machines and humans. To bridge this gap, we introduce an additional modality to enrich the reasoning capabilities of PLMs. We propose Imagine (Machine Imagination-based Reasoning), a novel zero-shot commonsense reasoning framework that supplements textual inputs with visual signals from machine-generated images. Specifically, we enhance PLMs with the ability to imagine by embedding an image generator directly into the reasoning pipeline. To facilitate effective utilization of this imagined visual context, we construct synthetic datasets designed to emulate visual question-answering scenarios. Through comprehensive evaluations on multiple commonsense reasoning benchmarks, we demonstrate that Imagine substantially outperforms existing zero-shot approaches and even surpasses advanced large language models. These results underscore the capability of machine imagination to mitigate reporting bias and significantly enhance the generalization ability of commonsense reasoning models

Hyuntae Park, Yeachan Kim, SangKeun Lee

Department of Artificial Intelligence, Korea University, 145 Anam-ro, Seungbuk-gu, Seoul, 02841, Republic of Korea · Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Korea University, 145 Anam-ro, Seungbuk-gu, Seoul, 02841, Republic of Korea

LLM ReasoningZero-Shot LearningKnowledge Augmentation for Language Models
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Mar 3, 2026

GSI Agent: Domain Knowledge Enhancement for Large Language Models in Green Stormwater Infrastructure

Green Stormwater Infrastructure (GSI) systems, such as permeable pavement, rain gardens, and bioretention facilities, require continuous inspection and maintenance to ensure long-term performance. However, domain knowledge about GSI is often scattered across municipal manuals, regulatory documents, and inspection forms. As a result, non-expert users and maintenance staff may struggle to obtain reliable and actionable guidance from field observations. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong general reasoning and language generation capabilities, they often lack domain-specific knowledge and may produce inaccurate or hallucinated answers in engineering scenarios. This limitation restricts their direct application to professional infrastructure tasks. In this paper, we propose GSI Agent, a domain-enhanced LLM framework designed to improve performance in GSI-related tasks. Our approach integrates three complementary strategies: (1) supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on a curated GSI instruction dataset, (2) retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) over an internal GSI knowledge base constructed from municipal documents, and (3) an agent-based reasoning pipeline that coordinates retrieval, context integration, and structured response generation. We also construct a new GSI Dataset aligned with real-world GSI inspection and maintenance scenarios. Experimental results show that our framework significantly improves domain-specific performance while maintaining general knowledge capability. On the GSI dataset, BLEU-4 improves from 0.090 to 0.307, while performance on the common knowledge dataset remains stable (0.304 vs. 0.305). These results demonstrate that systematic domain knowledge enhancement can effectively adapt general-purpose LLMs to professional infrastructure applications.

Shaohuang Wang

Knowledge Augmentation for Language ModelsKnowledge-Intensive QA
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Mar 2, 2026

FLANS at SemEval-2026 Task 7: RAG with Open-Sourced Smaller LLMs for Everyday Knowledge Across Diverse Languages and Cultures

This system paper describes our participation in the SemEval-2025 Task-7 ``Everyday Knowledge Across Diverse Languages and Cultures''. We attended two subtasks, i.e., Track 1: Short Answer Questions (SAQ), and Track 2: Multiple-Choice Questions (MCQ). The methods we used are retrieval augmented generation (RAGs) with open-sourced smaller LLMs (OS-sLLMs). To better adapt to this shared task, we created our own culturally aware knowledge base (CulKBs) by extracting Wikipedia content using keyword lists we prepared. We extracted both culturally-aware wiki-text and country-specific wiki-summary. In addition to the local CulKBs, we also have one system integrating live online search output via DuckDuckGo. Towards better privacy and sustainability, we aimed to deploy smaller LLMs (sLLMs) that are open-sourced on the Ollama platform. We share the prompts we developed using refinement techniques and report the learning curve of such prompts. The tested languages are English, Spanish, and Chinese for both tracks. Our resources and codes are shared via https://github.com/aaronlifenghan/FLANS-2026

Liliia Bogdanova, Shiran Sun, Lifeng Han +2

Insilico Medicine AI Limited · University of Groningen · LIACS, Leiden University +1

Multilingual QAKnowledge Augmentation for Language ModelsCultural Knowledge in Language ModelsCross-Cultural Language Model Evaluation
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Mar 1, 2026

Linking Knowledge to Care: Knowledge Graph-Augmented Medical Follow-Up Question Generation

Clinical diagnosis is time-consuming, requiring intensive interactions between patients and medical professionals. While large language models (LLMs) could ease the pre-diagnostic workload, their limited domain knowledge hinders effective medical question generation. We introduce a Knowledge Graph-augmented LLM with active in-context learning to generate relevant and important follow-up questions, KG-Followup, serving as a critical module for the pre-diagnostic assessment. The structured medical domain knowledge graph serves as a seamless patch-up to provide professional domain expertise upon which the LLM can reason. Experiments demonstrate that KG-Followup outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 5% - 8% on relevant benchmarks in recall.

Liwen Sun, Xiang Yu, Ming Tan +4

Carnegie Mellon university · Amazon Health AI

Medical LLMsKnowledge Augmentation for Language Models
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Mar 1, 2026

Understanding LoRA as Knowledge Memory: An Empirical Analysis

Continuous knowledge updating for pre-trained large language models (LLMs) is increasingly necessary yet remains challenging. Although inference-time methods like In-Context Learning (ICL) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) are popular, they face constraints in context budgets, costs, and retrieval fragmentation. Departing from these context-dependent paradigms, this work investigates a parametric approach using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) as a modular knowledge memory. Although few recent works examine this concept, the fundamental mechanics governing its capacity and composability remain largely unexplored. We bridge this gap through the first systematic empirical study mapping the design space of LoRA-based memory, ranging from characterizing storage capacity and optimizing internalization to scaling multi-module systems and evaluating long-context reasoning. Rather than proposing a single architecture, we provide practical guidance on the operational boundaries of LoRA memory. Overall, our findings position LoRA as the complementary axis of memory alongside RAG and ICL, offering distinct advantages.

Seungju Back, Dongwoo Lee, Naun Kang +4

KAIST · Samsung SDS · New York University

Continual Learning for LLMsMemory-Augmented Language ModelsKnowledge Augmentation for Language ModelsPersistent Memory for Language ModelsLow-Rank Adaptation
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Feb 27, 2026

A unified foundational framework for knowledge injection and evaluation of Large Language Models in Combustion Science

To advance foundation Large Language Models (LLMs) for combustion science, this study presents the first end-to-end framework for developing domain-specialized models for the combustion community. The framework comprises an AI-ready multimodal knowledge base at the 3.5 billion-token scale, extracted from over 200,000 peer-reviewed articles, 8,000 theses and dissertations, and approximately 400,000 lines of combustion CFD code; a rigorous and largely automated evaluation benchmark (CombustionQA, 436 questions across eight subfields); and a three-stage knowledge-injection pathway that progresses from lightweight retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to knowledge-graph-enhanced retrieval and continued pretraining. We first quantitatively validate Stage 1 (naive RAG) and find a hard ceiling: standard RAG accuracy peaks at 60%, far surpassing zero-shot performance (23%) yet well below the theoretical upper bound (87%). We further demonstrate that this stage's performance is severely constrained by context contamination. Consequently, building a domain foundation model requires structured knowledge graphs and continued pretraining (Stages 2 and 3).

Zonglin Yang, Runze Mao, Tianhao Wu +3

School of Mechanics and Engineering Science, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, PRChina · AI for Science Institute, Beijing, 100080, China

Knowledge Augmentation for Language ModelsLLM EvaluationRetrieval-Augmented GenerationContinued Pretraining
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Feb 25, 2026

Decoder-based Sense Knowledge Distillation

Large language models (LLMs) learn contextual embeddings that capture rich semantic information, yet they often overlook structured lexical knowledge such as word senses and relationships. Prior work has shown that incorporating sense dictionaries can improve knowledge distillation for encoder models, but their application to decoder as generative models remains challenging. In this paper, we introduce Decoder-based Sense Knowledge Distillation (DSKD), a framework that integrates lexical resources into the training of decoder-style LLMs without requiring dictionary lookup at inference time. Extensive experiments on diverse benchmarks demonstrate that DSKD significantly enhances knowledge distillation performance for decoders, enabling generative models to inherit structured semantics while maintaining efficient training.

Qitong Wang, Mohammed J. Zaki, Georgios Kollias +1

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Troy, New York, USA · IBM Research Yorktown Heights, New York, USA

Language Model DistillationKnowledge DistillationKnowledge Augmentation for Language ModelsDecoder-Only Language Models
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Feb 25, 2026

Personalized Graph-Empowered Large Language Model for Proactive Information Access

Since individuals may struggle to recall all life details and often confuse events, establishing a system to assist users in recalling forgotten experiences is essential. While numerous studies have proposed memory recall systems, these primarily rely on deep learning techniques that require extensive training and often face data scarcity due to the limited availability of personal lifelogs. As lifelogs grow over time, systems must also adapt quickly to newly accumulated data. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various tasks, making them promising for personalized applications. In this work, we present a framework that leverages LLMs for proactive information access, integrating personal knowledge graphs to enhance the detection of access needs through a refined decision-making process. Our framework offers high flexibility, enabling the replacement of base models and the modification of fact retrieval methods for continuous improvement. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach effectively identifies forgotten events, supporting users in recalling past experiences more efficiently.

Chia Cheng Chang, An-Zi Yen, Hen-Hsen Huang +1

Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan · Department of Computer Science, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan · Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan +1

Persistent Memory for Language ModelsInformation RetrievalPersonalized Language ModelsKnowledge Augmentation for Language Models
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Feb 23, 2026

NanoKnow: How to Know What Your Language Model Knows

How do large language models (LLMs) know what they know? Answering this question has been difficult because pre-training data is often a "black box" - unknown or inaccessible. The recent release of nanochat - a family of small LLMs with fully open pre-training data - addresses this as it provides a transparent view into where a model's parametric knowledge comes from. Towards the goal of understanding how knowledge is encoded by LLMs, we release NanoKnow, a benchmark dataset that partitions questions from Natural Questions and SQuAD into splits based on whether their answers are present in nanochat's pre-training corpus. Using these splits, we can now properly disentangle the sources of knowledge that LLMs rely on when producing an output. To demonstrate NanoKnow's utility, we conduct experiments using eight nanochat checkpoints. Our findings show: (1) closed-book accuracy is strongly influenced by answer frequency in the pre-training data, (2) providing external evidence can mitigate this frequency dependence, (3) even with external evidence, models are more accurate when answers were seen during pre-training, demonstrating that parametric and external knowledge are complementary, and (4) non-relevant information is harmful, with accuracy decreasing based on both the position and the number of non-relevant contexts. We release all NanoKnow artifacts at https://github.com/castorini/NanoKnow.

Lingwei Gu, Nour Jedidi, Jimmy Lin

University of Waterloo Waterloo, ON, Canada

Factual Knowledge in Language ModelsLanguage Model PretrainingKnowledge Augmentation for Language Models
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Feb 23, 2026

Structured Prompt Language: Declarative Context Management for LLMs

We present SPL (Structured Prompt Language), a declarative SQL-inspired language that treats large language models as generative knowledge bases and their context windows as constrained resources. SPL provides explicit WITH BUDGET/LIMIT token management, an automatic query optimizer, EXPLAIN transparency analogous to SQL's EXPLAIN ANALYZE, and native integration of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and persistent memory in a single declarative framework. SPL-flow extends SPL into resilient agentic pipelines with a three-tier provider fallback strategy (Ollama -> OpenRouter -> self-healing retry) fully transparent to the .spl script. Five extensions demonstrate the paradigm's breadth: (1) Text2SPL (multilingual NL->SPL translation); (2) Mixture-of-Models (MoM) routing that dispatches each PROMPT to a domain-specialist model at runtime; (3) Logical Chunking, an intelligent strategy for documents exceeding a single context window--expressed naturally through SPL's existing CTE syntax with no new constructs, decomposing a large query into a Map-Reduce pipeline that reduces attention cost from O(N^2) to O(N^2/k) and runs identically on cloud (parallel) or local hardware (sequential); (4) SPL-flow, a declarative agentic orchestration layer with resilient three-tier provider fallback; and (5) BENCHMARK for parallel multi-model comparison with automatic winner persistence. We provide a formal EBNF grammar, two pip-installable Python packages (spl-llm, spl-flow), and comparison against Prompty, DSPy, and LMQL. SPL reduces prompt boilerplate by 65% on average, surfaces a 68x cost spread across model tiers as a pre-execution signal, and runs the identical .spl script at $0.002 on OpenRouter or at zero marginal cost on a local Ollama instance--without modification.

Wen G. Gong

LLM PromptingLLM Context ManagementLLM RoutingKnowledge Augmentation for Language Models
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Feb 19, 2026

Ontology-Guided Neuro-Symbolic Inference: Grounding Language Models with Mathematical Domain Knowledge

Language models exhibit fundamental limitations -- hallucination, brittleness, and lack of formal grounding -- that are particularly problematic in high-stakes specialist fields requiring verifiable reasoning. I investigate whether formal domain ontologies can enhance language model reliability through retrieval-augmented generation. Using mathematics as proof of concept, I implement a neuro-symbolic pipeline leveraging the OpenMath ontology with hybrid retrieval and cross-encoder reranking to inject relevant definitions into model prompts. Evaluation on the MATH benchmark with three open-source models reveals that ontology-guided context improves performance when retrieval quality is high, but irrelevant context actively degrades it -- highlighting both the promise and challenges of neuro-symbolic approaches.

Marcelo Labre

Advanced Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2)

Retrieval-Augmented GenerationLLM GroundingKnowledge Augmentation for Language ModelsLLM ReliabilityNeuro-Symbolic ReasoningLLM Mathematical Reasoning
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Feb 19, 2026

Enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs) for Telecom using Dynamic Knowledge Graphs and Explainable Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong potential across a variety of tasks, but their application in the telecom field remains challenging due to domain complexity, evolving standards, and specialized terminology. Therefore, general-domain LLMs may struggle to provide accurate and reliable outputs in this context, leading to increased hallucinations and reduced utility in telecom operations.To address these limitations, this work introduces KG-RAG-a novel framework that integrates knowledge graphs (KGs) with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to enhance LLMs for telecom-specific tasks. In particular, the KG provides a structured representation of domain knowledge derived from telecom standards and technical documents, while RAG enables dynamic retrieval of relevant facts to ground the model's outputs. Such a combination improves factual accuracy, reduces hallucination, and ensures compliance with telecom specifications.Experimental results across benchmark datasets demonstrate that KG-RAG outperforms both LLM-only and standard RAG baselines, e.g., KG-RAG achieves an average accuracy improvement of 14.3% over RAG and 21.6% over LLM-only models. These results highlight KG-RAG's effectiveness in producing accurate, reliable, and explainable outputs in complex telecom scenarios.

Dun Yuan, Hao Zhou, Xue Liu +4

Charlie · School of Computer Science, McGill University, Montreal, QC H3A 0E9, Canada. · Standards and Mobility Innovation Lab, Samsung Research America, Plano, Texas, TX 75023, USA.

Knowledge Augmentation for Language ModelsGraph Retrieval-Augmented GenerationLLM GroundingRAG Robustness
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Feb 19, 2026

Exploring LLMs for User Story Extraction from Mockups

User stories are one of the most widely used artifacts in the software industry to define functional requirements. In parallel, the use of high-fidelity mockups facilitates end-user participation in defining their needs. In this work, we explore how combining these techniques with large language models (LLMs) enables agile and automated generation of user stories from mockups. To this end, we present a case study that analyzes the ability of LLMs to extract user stories from high-fidelity mockups, both with and without the inclusion of a glossary of the Language Extended Lexicon (LEL) in the prompts. Our results demonstrate that incorporating the LEL significantly enhances the accuracy and suitability of the generated user stories. This approach represents a step forward in the integration of AI into requirements engineering, with the potential to improve communication between users and developers.

Diego Firmenich, Leandro Antonelli, Bruno Pazos +2

Departamento de Informática, Facultad de Ingeniería, Universidad Nacional de la Patagonia, Argentina · LIFIA, Facultad de Informática, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina · CAETI, Facultad de Tecnología Informática - Universidad Abierta Interamericana +3

Requirements EngineeringText GenerationLLM PromptingKnowledge Augmentation for Language Models
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Feb 16, 2026

Panini: Continual Learning in Token Space via Structured Memory

Language models are increasingly used to reason over content they were not trained on, such as new documents, evolving knowledge, and user-specific data. A common approach is retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), which stores verbatim documents externally (as chunks) and retrieves only a relevant subset at inference time for an LLM to reason over. However, this results in inefficient usage of test-time compute (LLM repeatedly reasons over the same documents); moreover, chunk retrieval can inject irrelevant context that increases unsupported generation. We propose a human-like non-parametric continual learning framework, where the base model remains fixed, and learning occurs by integrating each new experience into an external semantic memory state that accumulates and consolidates itself continually. We present Panini, which realizes this by representing documents as Generative Semantic Workspaces (GSW) -- an entity- and event-aware network of question-answer (QA) pairs, sufficient for an LLM to reconstruct the experienced situations and mine latent knowledge via reasoning-grounded inference chains on the network. Given a query, Panini only traverses the continually-updated GSW (not the verbatim documents or chunks), and retrieves the most likely inference chains. Across six QA benchmarks, Panini achieves the highest average performance, 5%-7% higher than other competitive baselines, while using 2-30x fewer answer-context tokens, supports fully open-source pipelines, and reduces unsupported answers on curated unanswerable queries. The results show that efficient and accurate structuring of experiences at write time -- as achieved by the GSW framework -- yields both efficiency and reliability gains at read time. Code is available at https://github.com/roychowdhuryresearch/gsw-memory.

Shreyas Rajesh, Pavan Holur, Mehmet Yigit Turali +2

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, Los Angeles, USA.

Continual Learning for LLMsMemory-Augmented Language ModelsPersistent Memory for Language ModelsKnowledge Augmentation for Language ModelsRAG RobustnessLLM Reasoning with Graphs
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Feb 16, 2026

CGRA-DeBERTa Concept Guided Residual Augmentation Transformer for Theologically Islamic Understanding

Accurate QA over classical Islamic texts remains challenging due to domain specific semantics, long context dependencies, and concept sensitive reasoning. Therefore, a new CGRA DeBERTa, a concept guided residual domain augmentation transformer framework, is proposed that enhances theological QA over Hadith corpora. The CGRA DeBERTa builds on a customized DeBERTa transformer backbone with lightweight LoRA based adaptations and a residual concept aware gating mechanism. The customized DeBERTa embedding block learns global and positional context, while Concept Guided Residual Blocks incorporate theological priors from a curated Islamic Concept Dictionary of 12 core terms. Moreover, the Concept Gating Mechanism selectively amplifies semantically critical tokens via importance weighted attention, applying differential scaling from 1.04 to 3.00. This design preserves contextual integrity, strengthens domain-specific semantic representations, and enables accurate, efficient span extraction while maintaining computational efficiency. This paper reports the results of training CGRA using a specially constructed dataset of 42591 QA pairs from the text of Sahih alBukhari and Sahih Muslim. While BERT achieved an EM score of 75.87 and DeBERTa one of 89.77, our model scored 97.85 and thus surpassed them by 8.08 on an absolute scale, all while adding approximately 8 inference overhead due to parameter efficient gating. The qualitative evaluation noted better extraction and discrimination and theological precision. This study presents Hadith QA systems that are efficient, interpretable, and accurate and that scale provide educational materials with necessary theological nuance.

Tahir Hussain, Saddam Hussain Khan

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of Computer Systems Engineering, University of Engineering and Applied Sciences · Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of Computer Systems Engineering, University of Engineering and Applied Sciences (UEAS), Swat, Pakistan · Interdisciplinary Research Center for Smart Mobility and Logistics +1

Question AnsweringKnowledge Augmentation for Language Models
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Feb 6, 2026

SHINE: A Scalable In-Context Hypernetwork for Mapping Context to LoRA in a Single Pass

We propose SHINE (Scalable Hyper In-context NEtwork), a scalable hypernetwork that can map diverse meaningful contexts into high-quality LoRA adapters for large language models (LLMs). By reusing the frozen LLM's own parameters in an in-context hypernetwork design and introducing architectural innovations, SHINE overcomes key limitations of prior hypernetworks and achieves strong expressive power with a relatively small number of parameters. We introduce a pretraining and instruction fine-tuning pipeline, and train our hypernetwork to generate high quality LoRA adapters from diverse meaningful contexts in a single forward pass. It updates LLM parameters without any fine-tuning, and immediately enables complex question answering tasks related to the context without directly accessing the context, effectively transforming in-context knowledge to in-parameter knowledge in one pass. Our work achieves outstanding results on various tasks, greatly saves time, computation and memory costs compared to SFT-based LLM adaptation, and shows great potential for scaling. Our code is available at https://github.com/MuLabPKU/SHINE

Yewei Liu, Xiyuan Wang, Yansheng Mao +3

Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Peking University · School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science, Peking University · University of Oxford +1

Knowledge Augmentation for Language ModelsLow-Rank AdaptationHypernetworksIn-Context LearningParameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning
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Feb 2, 2026

Edit Knowledge, Not Just Facts via Multi-Step Reasoning over Background Stories

Enabling artificial intelligence systems, particularly large language models, to update knowledge and flexibly apply it during reasoning remains a central challenge. Existing knowledge editing approaches emphasize atomic facts, improving factual recall but often failing to integrate updated information into a coherent framework usable across contexts. In this work, we argue that knowledge update is fundamentally a reasoning problem rather than a memorization problem. Consequently, a model should be trained in situations where the new information is instrumental to solving a task, combined with pre-existing knowledge, and exercised through multi-step reasoning. Based on this insight, we propose a training strategy based on three principles. First, new knowledge is introduced as a coherent background story that contextualizes novel facts and explains their relation to existing knowledge. Second, models are trained using self-generated multi-hop questions that require multi-step reasoning involving the new information. Third, training is done using knowledge distillation, forcing a student model to internalize the teacher's reasoning behavior without access to the novel information. Experiments show that models trained with this strategy effectively leverage newly acquired knowledge during reasoning and achieve remarkable performance on challenging questions that require combining multiple new facts.

Ya Gao, Kalle Kujanpää, Pekka Marttinen +2

Aalto University · System 2 AI

Knowledge EditingKnowledge Augmentation for Language Models
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Jan 16, 2026

Predict the Retrieval! Test time adaptation for Retrieval Augmented Generation

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a powerful approach for enhancing large language models' question-answering capabilities through the integration of external knowledge. However, when adapting RAG systems to specialized domains, challenges arise from distribution shifts, resulting in suboptimal generalization performance. In this work, we propose TTARAG, a test-time adaptation method that dynamically updates the language model's parameters during inference to improve RAG system performance in specialized domains. Our method introduces a simple yet effective approach where the model learns to predict retrieved content, enabling automatic parameter adjustment to the target domain. Through extensive experiments across six specialized domains, we demonstrate that TTARAG achieves substantial performance improvements over baseline RAG systems. Code available at https://github.com/sunxin000/TTARAG.

Xin Sun, Zhongqi Chen, Qiang Liu +5

NLPR, MAIS, CASIA · Ant Group · USTC

Retrieval-Augmented GenerationTest-Time AdaptationKnowledge Augmentation for Language ModelsDomain AdaptationAdaptive RAG
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Dec 31, 2025

RIMRULE: Improving Tool-Using Language Agents via MDL-Guided Rule Learning

Large language models (LLMs) often struggle to use tools reliably in domain-specific settings, where APIs may be idiosyncratic, under-documented, or tailored to private workflows. This highlights the need for effective adaptation to task-specific tools. We propose RIMRULE, a neuro-symbolic approach for LLM adaptation based on dynamic rule injection. Compact, interpretable rules are distilled from failure traces and injected into the prompt during inference to improve task performance. These rules are proposed by the LLM itself and consolidated using a Minimum Description Length (MDL) objective that favors generality and conciseness. Each rule is stored in both natural language and a structured symbolic form, supporting efficient retrieval at inference time. Experiments on tool-use benchmarks show that this approach improves accuracy on both seen and unseen tools without modifying LLM weights. It outperforms prompting-based adaptation methods and complements finetuning. Moreover, rules learned from one LLM can be reused to improve others, including long reasoning LLMs, highlighting the portability of symbolic knowledge across architectures.

Xiang Gao, Yuguang Yao, Qi Zhang +5

1Intuit AI Research · 2Temple University

Knowledge Augmentation for Language ModelsLLM Tool UseNeuro-Symbolic AI
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Dec 18, 2025

AdaSearch: Balancing Parametric Knowledge and Search in Large Language Models via Reinforcement Learning

Equipping large language models (LLMs) with search engines via reinforcement learning (RL) promises effective search agents. However, adaptively balancing internal parametric knowledge with external search remains a challenge, as overreliance on search introduces unnecessary cost and risks exposure to noisy or malicious content, while relying solely on parametric knowledge risks hallucination. Prior efforts mitigate search overuse through tool-call reward shaping, which requires heavy reward engineering and conflates necessary and unnecessary search. To address these limitations, we revisit the evaluation of search agents through an F1-based decision metric, revealing that prior methods often overlook readily available parametric knowledge. Motivated by this, we propose AdaSearch, a simple two-stage, outcome-driven RL framework that disentangles problem-solving from the decision to search, making the decision process explicit and interpretable. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AdaSearch significantly improves search-decision quality and reduces unnecessary search calls, with only a small trade-off in QA accuracy relative to always-search.

Tzu-Han Lin, Wei-Lin Chen, Chen-An Li +3

National Taiwan University · Department of Computer Science, University of Virginia

Retrieval-Augmented GenerationKnowledge Augmentation for Language ModelsLLM Tool UseRL for LLM Agents
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Dec 5, 2025

Multilingual Medical Reasoning for Question Answering with Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) with reasoning capabilities have recently demonstrated strong potential in medical Question Answering (QA). Existing approaches are largely English-focused and primarily rely on distillation from general-purpose LLMs, raising concerns about the reliability of their medical knowledge. In this work, we present a method to generate multilingual reasoning traces based on medical knowledge extracted from Wikipedia. We produce 500k traces in English, Italian, and Spanish, using a retrieval-augmented generation approach over medical information from Wikipedia. The traces are generated to solve medical questions drawn from MedQA and MedMCQA, which we extend to Italian and Spanish. We test our pipeline in both in-domain and out-of-domain settings across Medical QA benchmarks, and demonstrate that our reasoning traces improve performance both when utilized via in-context learning (few-shot) and supervised fine-tuning, yielding state-of-the-art results among 8B-parameter LLMs. We believe that these resources can support the development of more transparent clinical decision-support tools in multilingual settings. We release the full suite of resources: reasoning traces, translated QA datasets, Medical-Wikipedia, and fine-tuned models.

Pietro Ferrazzi, Aitor Soroa, Rodrigo Agerri

Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Trento, Italy · HiTZ Center - Ixa, University of the Basque Country EHU, Spain

Knowledge Augmentation for Language ModelsHealthcareMedical QAMultilingual QAMedical ReasoningMedical LLMs
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Oct 20, 2025

Zoom In Disparities in Healthcare LLM Q&A

Equitable access to reliable health information is vital when integrating AI into healthcare. Yet, information quality varies across languages, raising concerns about the reliability and consistency of multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs). We systematically examine cross-lingual disparities in pre-training source and factuality alignment in LLM answers for multilingual healthcare Q&A across English, German, Turkish, Chinese (Mandarin), and Italian. We (i) constructed Multilingual Wiki Health Care (MultiWikiHealthCare), a multilingual dataset from Wikipedia; (ii) analyzed cross-lingual healthcare coverage; (iii) assessed LLM response alignment with these references; and (iv) conducted a case study on factual alignment through the use of contextual information and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Our findings reveal substantial cross-lingual disparities in both Wikipedia coverage and LLM factual alignment. Across LLMs, responses align more with English Wikipedia, even when the prompts are non-English. Providing contextual excerpts from non-English Wikipedia at inference time effectively shifts factual alignment toward culturally relevant knowledge. These results highlight practical pathways for building more equitable, multilingual AI systems for healthcare.

Ipek Baris Schlicht, Burcu Sayin, Zhixue Zhao +5

Universitat Politècnica de València, Valencia, Spain · University of Trento, Trento, Italy · University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK +5

Multilingual Language Model EvaluationKnowledge Augmentation for Language ModelsHealthcareMultilingual QAFactual Knowledge in Language ModelsClinical Language Model Evaluation
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Oct 15, 2025

Instruction Retrieval at Inference Time for Small Language Models

The facts a language model stores are tied to its parameter count, so small models that fit on edge devices fail on expert problems, which need specialized knowledge and follow multi-step procedures. Fine-tuning for a specific domain or task writes the knowledge into the parameters but must be repeated for every model and domain, and a retrieved passage leaves the model to find the relevant fact and apply it on its own. We introduce instruction retrieval, which distills a teacher model's expertise into a corpus of instructions tailored so that a small model can follow. For each cluster of a domain's problems, the teacher writes one instruction with the background knowledge the cluster depends on, a procedure for that kind of problem, and the common mistakes made on it. This reusable corpus needs only to be built once per domain and requires no run-time teacher access. At inference, a frozen small model retrieves the instructions nearest its question and follows them, with no fine-tuning. Across medicine, law, and mathematics benchmarks, we demonstrate the corpus improves over zero-shot on every task and over few-shot prompting, self-consistency, and other retrieved text on medicine and law. On MedQA the corpus raises mean accuracy by 10.6 points, where retrieved textbook passages raise it by 3.9 and few-shot examples from the same teacher lower it. An error analysis shows that only the background knowledge fixes the questions a small model always gets wrong, and that the procedure and common mistakes fix only the questions where it wavers between options. Our results show that automatically retrieved inference-time procedural guidance and domain knowledge can yield substantial gains for small models.

Kenan Alkiek, David Jurgens, Vinod Vydiswaran

School of Information University of Michigan Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA

Knowledge Augmentation for Language ModelsSmall Language ModelsKnowledge-Intensive QA
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Aug 14, 2025

Dataset Construction for Training LLM to Learn Analog Circuit Knowledge

This paper constructs a textual dataset for training large language models (LLMs) to learn analog circuit knowledge and customizes LLM training techniques. For dataset construction, high-quality textbooks are collected and decomposed into fine-grained learning nodes, which are then used to construct structured question-thinking-solution-answer (QTSA) quadruples using a multi-agent framework to capture both final answers and thought processes. The resulting dataset consists of 7.26M tokens of unlabeled data for continual pre-training (CPT) and 112.65M tokens of labeled data for supervised fine-tuning (SFT). We customize the training techniques including initial model selection, training paradigms, regularization techniques, and practical implementation references. Instruct models are identified as suitable training initialization points, an SFT-centric training paradigm is established (finding that CPT provides marginal benefits compared with SFT due to imbalanced data distribution), and SFT with KL divergence regularization can achieve a 2.71 percentage-point improvement over SFT alone. A practical training implementation method is provided for resource-constrained scenarios. Experiments demonstrate that the dataset and training techniques enhance LLMs' analog circuit knowledge. The trained 32B instruct model achieves 84.59% accuracy on the AMSBench-TQA benchmark, showing a 15.67 percentage-point improvement over the initial model. The trained model also shows capability in the operational amplifier design task based on the Atelier framework.

Zihao Chen, Ji Zhuang, Jinyi Shen +11

Fudan University, Shanghai, China

Language Model PretrainingKnowledge Augmentation for Language ModelsLLM Fine-Tuning
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Oct 22, 2024

All Entities are Not Created Equal: Examining the Long Tail for Ultra-Fine Entity Typing

Due to their capacity to acquire world knowledge from large corpora, pre-trained language models (PLMs) are extensively used in ultra-fine entity typing tasks where the space of labels is extremely large. In this work, we explore the limitations of the knowledge acquired by PLMs by proposing a novel heuristic to approximate the pre-training distribution of entities when the pre-training data is unknown. Then, we systematically demonstrate that entity-typing approaches that rely solely on the parametric knowledge of PLMs struggle significantly with entities at the long tail of the pre-training distribution, and that knowledge-infused approaches can account for some of these shortcomings. Our findings suggest that we need to go beyond PLMs to produce solutions that perform well for infrequent entities.

Advait Deshmukh, Ashwin Umadi, Dananjay Srinivas +1

University of Colorado Boulder

Language Model PretrainingLong-Tail LearningKnowledge Augmentation for Language ModelsFactual Knowledge in Language Models
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May 7, 2024

FlashBack: Efficient Retrieval-Augmented Language Modeling for Fast Inference

Retrieval-Augmented Language Modeling (RALM) by integrating large language models (LLM) with relevant documents from an external corpus is a proven method for enabling the LLM to generate information beyond the scope of its pre-training corpus. Previous work utilizing retrieved content by simply prepending it to the input poses a high runtime issue, which degrades the inference efficiency of the LLMs because they fail to use the Key-Value (KV) cache efficiently. In this paper, we propose FlashBack, a modular RALM designed to improve the inference efficiency of RALM with appending context pattern while maintaining decent performance after fine-tuning by Low-Rank Adaption. FlashBack appends retrieved documents at the end of the context for efficiently utilizing the KV cache instead of prepending them. And we introduce Marking Token as two special prompt tokens for marking the boundary of the appending context during fine-tuning. Our experiments on testing generation quality show that FlashBack can remain decent generation quality in perplexity. And the inference speed of FlashBack is up to 4×4\times faster than the prepending counterpart on a 7B LLM (Llama 2) in the runtime test. Via bypassing unnecessary re-computation, it demonstrates an advancement by achieving significantly faster inference speed, and this heightened efficiency will substantially reduce inferential cost.

Runheng Liu, Xingchen Xiao, Heyan Huang +2

School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology

Knowledge Augmentation for Language ModelsLLM Inference Acceleration
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