How Large Language Models Balance Internal Knowledge with User and Document Assertions
Large language models (LLMs) often need to balance their internal parametric knowledge with external information, such as user beliefs and content from retrieved documents, in real-world scenarios like RAG or chat-based systems. A model's ability to reliably process these sources is key to system safety. Previous studies on knowledge conflict and sycophancy are limited to a binary conflict paradigm, primarily exploring conflicts between parametric knowledge and either a document or a user, but ignoring the interactive environment where all three sources exist simultaneously. To fill this gap, we propose a three-source interaction framework and systematically evaluate 27 LLMs from 3 famili...
| Authors | Shuowei Li, Haoxin Li, Wenda Chu et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 24 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 24 April 2026 |
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