Knowledgeless Language Models: Suppressing Parametric Recall for Evidence-Grounded Language Modeling
Language models encode substantial factual knowledge in their parameters, which can lead to unreliable behavior when this knowledge is outdated, incomplete, or misaligned with the provided context. In this work, we study whether modifying the pretraining signal can systematically shift models away from parametric recall and toward evidence-grounded reasoning. We introduce Knowledge--''Less'' Language Models (KLLMs), a fundamentally different epistemic training paradigm for LLMs, which are pretrained on corpora in which named entities are anonymized, thereby removing a primary channel for entity-linked factual supervision. This intervention substantially reduces closed-book factual recall,...
| Authors | Roi Cohen, Yvan Carré, Nick Lechtenbörger et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 14 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 14 July 2026 |
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