When Retrieval Partially Conflicts with Skills: Understanding Procedural Hallucination in Language Models
Language models increasingly use skills that provide reusable instructions and procedures for task execution. After a relevant skill has been selected, the model may need to apply its governing procedure together with retrieved task context. When the retrieved context is useful but contains cues that violate the skill, the model must retain compatible information while rejecting the conflicting cues. We study failures in which the model adopts such cues and produces a retrieval-supported but skill-invalid answer, which we call procedural hallucination. We introduce SourceClash, a matched benchmark with 1,271 bundles and 6,355 prompts across ten procedural domains. Each bundle fixes the ta...
| Authors | Guanqun Jiang, Pengfei Cao, Kang Liu et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 19 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 19 October 2026 |
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