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Oct 27

Bidirectional LMs are Better Knowledge Memorizers? A Benchmark for Real-world Knowledge Injection

Despite significant advances in large language models (LLMs), their knowledge memorization capabilities remain underexplored, due to the lack of standardized and high-quality test ground. In this paper, we introduce a novel, real-world and large-scale knowledge injection benchmark that evolves continuously over time without requiring human intervention. Specifically, we propose WikiDYK, which leverages recently-added and human-written facts from Wikipedia's "Did You Know..." entries. These entries are carefully selected by expert Wikipedia editors based on criteria such as verifiability and clarity. Each entry is converted into multiple question-answer pairs spanning diverse task formats from easy cloze prompts to complex multi-hop questions. WikiDYK contains 12,290 facts and 77,180 questions, which is also seamlessly extensible with future updates from Wikipedia editors. Extensive experiments using continued pre-training reveal a surprising insight: despite their prevalence in modern LLMs, Causal Language Models (CLMs) demonstrate significantly weaker knowledge memorization capabilities compared to Bidirectional Language Models (BiLMs), exhibiting a 23% lower accuracy in terms of reliability. To compensate for the smaller scales of current BiLMs, we introduce a modular collaborative framework utilizing ensembles of BiLMs as external knowledge repositories to integrate with LLMs. Experiment shows that our framework further improves the reliability accuracy by up to 29.1%.

  • 8 authors
·
May 18, 2025 2

HiSTEVE 1.0: Harnessing Human-Interface VLA Agents for Open-World Games

Building virtual embodied agents that operate in open-ended games like human players is a long-standing goal requiring both long-horizon autonomy and reliable native-interface control. As a procedurally generated open world, Minecraft provides a natural testbed for studying the integration of these capabilities. Existing agents typically provide either native visuomotor control without long-horizon autonomy or high-level planning executed through environment APIs or predefined skills. To bridge this gap, we propose HiSTEVE, a hierarchical VLA agent with a capability-aware agent harness. At the orchestration level, we equip the harness with structured memory for tracking progress and a VLM planner for selecting subtasks within the VLA's capabilities. To reliably determine subtask completion, we further introduce a policy-coupled task completion state detector that conditions on VLA policy context to signal candidate completion. At the control level, a single VLA executes all subtasks with vision-only perception and native keyboard-and-mouse actions. To mitigate interference between heterogeneous GUI and non-GUI interactions, we introduce regime-specific RMSNorm branches and separate mouse-movement token embeddings. We also train the VLA through world knowledge injection, imitation learning, and reinforcement learning with environment feedback to improve reliability and recovery. HiSTEVE achieves state-of-the-art atomic-task performance, scoring 85.0% on MineStudio Bench and a 37.4% average success rate on OpenHA, while also completing long-horizon tasks such as crafting an iron pickaxe from scratch like human players.

tencent Tencent
·
Oct 21 4

KORE: Enhancing Knowledge Injection for Large Multimodal Models via Knowledge-Oriented Augmentations and Constraints

Large Multimodal Models encode extensive factual knowledge in their pre-trained weights. However, its knowledge remains static and limited, unable to keep pace with real-world developments, which hinders continuous knowledge acquisition. Effective knowledge injection thus becomes critical, involving two goals: knowledge adaptation (injecting new knowledge) and knowledge retention (preserving old knowledge). Existing methods often struggle to learn new knowledge and suffer from catastrophic forgetting. To address this, we propose KORE, a synergistic method of KnOwledge-oRientEd augmentations and constraints for injecting new knowledge into large multimodal models while preserving old knowledge. Unlike general text or image data augmentation, KORE automatically converts individual knowledge items into structured and comprehensive knowledge to ensure that the model accurately learns new knowledge, enabling accurate adaptation. Meanwhile, KORE stores previous knowledge in the covariance matrix of LMM's linear layer activations and initializes the adapter by projecting the original weights into the matrix's null space, defining a fine-tuning direction that minimizes interference with previous knowledge, enabling powerful retention. Extensive experiments on various LMMs, including LLaVA-v1.5-7B, LLaVA-v1.5-13B, and Qwen2.5-VL-7B, show that KORE achieves superior new knowledge injection performance and effectively mitigates catastrophic forgetting.

From Style to Facts: Mapping the Boundaries of Knowledge Injection with Finetuning

Finetuning provides a scalable and cost-effective means of customizing language models for specific tasks or response styles, with greater reliability than prompting or in-context learning. In contrast, the conventional wisdom is that injecting knowledge via finetuning results in brittle performance and poor generalization. We argue that the dichotomy of "task customization" (e.g., instruction tuning) and "knowledge injection" (e.g., teaching new facts) is a distinction without a difference. We instead identify concrete factors that explain the heterogeneous effectiveness observed with finetuning. To this end, we conduct a large-scale experimental study of finetuning the frontier Gemini v1.5 model family on a spectrum of datasets that are artificially engineered to interpolate between the strengths and failure modes of finetuning. Our findings indicate that question-answer training data formats provide much stronger knowledge generalization than document/article-style training data, numerical information can be harder for finetuning to retain than categorical information, and models struggle to apply finetuned knowledge during multi-step reasoning even when trained on similar examples -- all factors that render "knowledge injection" to be especially difficult, even after controlling for considerations like data augmentation and information volume. On the other hand, our findings also indicate that it is not fundamentally more difficult to finetune information about a real-world event than information about what a model's writing style should be.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 6, 2025

PPU-Bench:Real World Benchmark for Personalized Partial Unlearning in Vision Language Models

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) may memorize sensitive cross-modal information during pretraining. However, existing MLLM unlearning benchmarks rely on synthetic knowledge injection or complete subject-level deletion, which fail to capture realistic, personalized deletion requests that require fine-grained factual control. In this paper, we introduce PPU-Bench, a real-world and fine-tuning-free benchmark for personalized partial unlearning in MLLMs. PPU-Bench contains 24K multimodal and unimodal samples derived from pre-existing knowledge of 500 public figures under three progressively challenging settings: Complete, Selective, and Personalized unlearning. The benchmark evaluates whether methods can remove target knowledge while preserving non-target facts, model utility, and cross-modal consistency. Extensive experiments show that Complete Unlearning often suppresses visual identity rather than factual knowledge, while Selective and Personalized Unlearning expose significant forget--retain trade-offs and challenges in intra-subject factual boundaries. Robustness analysis under cross-image and prompt-based attacks reveals distinct vulnerabilities across different unlearning settings. Motivated by these findings, we propose Boundary-Aware Optimization (BAO), which explicitly models intra-subject forget-retain boundaries. Experimental results on two representative methods demonstrate that BAO can effectively enforce intra-subject factual boundaries.

  • 8 authors
·
May 8

DKPLM: Decomposable Knowledge-enhanced Pre-trained Language Model for Natural Language Understanding

Knowledge-Enhanced Pre-trained Language Models (KEPLMs) are pre-trained models with relation triples injecting from knowledge graphs to improve language understanding abilities. To guarantee effective knowledge injection, previous studies integrate models with knowledge encoders for representing knowledge retrieved from knowledge graphs. The operations for knowledge retrieval and encoding bring significant computational burdens, restricting the usage of such models in real-world applications that require high inference speed. In this paper, we propose a novel KEPLM named DKPLM that Decomposes Knowledge injection process of the Pre-trained Language Models in pre-training, fine-tuning and inference stages, which facilitates the applications of KEPLMs in real-world scenarios. Specifically, we first detect knowledge-aware long-tail entities as the target for knowledge injection, enhancing the KEPLMs' semantic understanding abilities and avoiding injecting redundant information. The embeddings of long-tail entities are replaced by "pseudo token representations" formed by relevant knowledge triples. We further design the relational knowledge decoding task for pre-training to force the models to truly understand the injected knowledge by relation triple reconstruction. Experiments show that our model outperforms other KEPLMs significantly over zero-shot knowledge probing tasks and multiple knowledge-aware language understanding tasks. We further show that DKPLM has a higher inference speed than other competing models due to the decomposing mechanism.

  • 7 authors
·
Dec 2, 2021

FlashRT: Towards Computationally and Memory Efficient Red-Teaming for Prompt Injection and Knowledge Corruption

Long-context large language models (LLMs)-for example, Gemini-3.1-Pro and Qwen-3.5-are widely used to empower many real-world applications, such as retrieval-augmented generation, autonomous agents, and AI assistants. However, security remains a major concern for their widespread deployment, with threats such as prompt injection and knowledge corruption. To quantify the security risks faced by LLMs under these threats, the research community has developed heuristic-based and optimization-based red-teaming methods. Optimization-based methods generally produce stronger attacks than heuristic attacks and thus provide a more rigorous assessment of LLM security risks. However, they are often resource-intensive, requiring significant computation and GPU memory, especially for long context scenarios. The resource-intensive nature poses a major obstacle for the community (especially academic researchers) to systematically evaluate the security risks of long-context LLMs and assess the effectiveness of defense strategies at scale. In this work, we propose FlashRT, the first framework to improve the efficiency (in terms of both computation and memory) for optimization-based prompt injection and knowledge corruption attacks under long-context LLMs. Through extensive evaluations, we find that FlashRT consistently delivers a 2x-7x speedup (e.g., reducing runtime from one hour to less than ten minutes) and a 2x-4x reduction in GPU memory consumption (e.g., reducing from 264.1 GB to 65.7 GB GPU memory for a 32K token context) compared to state-of-the-art baseline nanoGCG. FlashRT can be broadly applied to black-box optimization methods, such as TAP and AutoDAN. We hope FlashRT can serve as a red-teaming tool to enable systematic evaluation of long-context LLM security. The code is available at: https://github.com/Wang-Yanting/FlashRT

TracLLM: A Generic Framework for Attributing Long Context LLMs

Long context large language models (LLMs) are deployed in many real-world applications such as RAG, agent, and broad LLM-integrated applications. Given an instruction and a long context (e.g., documents, PDF files, webpages), a long context LLM can generate an output grounded in the provided context, aiming to provide more accurate, up-to-date, and verifiable outputs while reducing hallucinations and unsupported claims. This raises a research question: how to pinpoint the texts (e.g., sentences, passages, or paragraphs) in the context that contribute most to or are responsible for the generated output by an LLM? This process, which we call context traceback, has various real-world applications, such as 1) debugging LLM-based systems, 2) conducting post-attack forensic analysis for attacks (e.g., prompt injection attack, knowledge corruption attacks) to an LLM, and 3) highlighting knowledge sources to enhance the trust of users towards outputs generated by LLMs. When applied to context traceback for long context LLMs, existing feature attribution methods such as Shapley have sub-optimal performance and/or incur a large computational cost. In this work, we develop TracLLM, the first generic context traceback framework tailored to long context LLMs. Our framework can improve the effectiveness and efficiency of existing feature attribution methods. To improve the efficiency, we develop an informed search based algorithm in TracLLM. We also develop contribution score ensemble/denoising techniques to improve the accuracy of TracLLM. Our evaluation results show TracLLM can effectively identify texts in a long context that lead to the output of an LLM. Our code and data are at: https://github.com/Wang-Yanting/TracLLM.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 4, 2025

Educating LLMs like Human Students: Structure-aware Injection of Domain Knowledge

This paper presents a pioneering methodology, termed StructTuning, to efficiently transform foundation Large Language Models (LLMs) into domain specialists. It significantly minimizes the training corpus requirement to a mere 0.3% while achieving an impressive 50% of traditional knowledge injection performance. Our method is inspired by the educational processes for human students, particularly how structured domain knowledge from textbooks is absorbed and then applied to tackle real-world challenges through specific exercises. Based on this, we propose a novel two-stage knowledge injection strategy: Structure-aware Continual Pre-Training (SCPT) and Structure-aware Supervised Fine-Tuning (SSFT). In the SCPT phase, we organize the training data into an auto-generated taxonomy of domain knowledge, enabling LLMs to effectively memorize textual segments linked to specific expertise within the taxonomy's architecture. Subsequently, in the SSFT phase, we explicitly prompt models to reveal the underlying knowledge structure in their outputs, leveraging this structured domain insight to address practical problems adeptly. Our ultimate method has undergone extensive evaluations across model architectures and scales, using closed-book question-answering tasks on LongBench and MMedBench datasets. Remarkably, our method matches 50% of the improvement displayed by the state-of-the-art MMedLM2 on MMedBench, but with only 0.3% quantity of the training corpus. This breakthrough showcases the potential to scale up our StructTuning for stronger domain-specific LLMs. Code will be made public soon.

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 23, 2024

AdInject: Real-World Black-Box Attacks on Web Agents via Advertising Delivery

Vision-Language Model (VLM) based Web Agents represent a significant step towards automating complex tasks by simulating human-like interaction with websites. However, their deployment in uncontrolled web environments introduces significant security vulnerabilities. Existing research on adversarial environmental injection attacks often relies on unrealistic assumptions, such as direct HTML manipulation, knowledge of user intent, or access to agent model parameters, limiting their practical applicability. In this paper, we propose AdInject, a novel and real-world black-box attack method that leverages the internet advertising delivery to inject malicious content into the Web Agent's environment. AdInject operates under a significantly more realistic threat model than prior work, assuming a black-box agent, static malicious content constraints, and no specific knowledge of user intent. AdInject includes strategies for designing malicious ad content aimed at misleading agents into clicking, and a VLM-based ad content optimization technique that infers potential user intents from the target website's context and integrates these intents into the ad content to make it appear more relevant or critical to the agent's task, thus enhancing attack effectiveness. Experimental evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of AdInject, attack success rates exceeding 60% in most scenarios and approaching 100% in certain cases. This strongly demonstrates that prevalent advertising delivery constitutes a potent and real-world vector for environment injection attacks against Web Agents. This work highlights a critical vulnerability in Web Agent security arising from real-world environment manipulation channels, underscoring the urgent need for developing robust defense mechanisms against such threats. Our code is available at https://github.com/NicerWang/AdInject.

  • 8 authors
·
May 27, 2025 2

CORRECT: COndensed eRror RECognition via knowledge Transfer in multi-agent systems

Multi-agent systems (MAS) are increasingly capable of tackling complex real-world tasks, yet their reliance on inter-agent coordination, tool use, and long-horizon reasoning makes error recognition particularly challenging. Minor errors can propagate across agents, escalating into task failures while producing long, intertwined execution trajectories that impose significant costs for both human developers and automated systems to debug and analyze. Our key insight is that, despite surface differences in failure trajectories (e.g., logs), MAS errors often recur with similar structural patterns. This paper presents CORRECT, the first lightweight, training-free framework that leverages an online cache of distilled error schemata to recognize and transfer knowledge of failure structures across new requests. This cache-based reuse allows LLMs to perform targeted error localization at inference time, avoiding the need for expensive retraining while adapting to dynamic MAS deployments in subseconds. To support rigorous study in this domain, we also introduce CORRECT-Error, a large-scale dataset of over 2,000 annotated trajectories collected through a novel error-injection pipeline guided by real-world distributions, and further validated through human evaluation to ensure alignment with natural failure patterns. Experiments across seven diverse MAS applications show that CORRECT improves step-level error localization up to 19.8% over existing advances while at near-zero overhead, substantially narrowing the gap between automated and human-level error recognition.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 28, 2025 2

PIE-APT: Abductive Planning over Temporal Dynamic Knowledge Graphs via Incremental Reasoning

Planning over Temporal Dynamic Knowledge Graphs (TDKGs) presents theoretical challenges in open-world environments with incomplete information. Existing action formalisms often face decidability issues and the Ramification Problem, while structural abduction requires expansive combinatorial search spaces. We introduce a unified framework with two modules--PIE-Abducer (incremental direct-derivation abduction) and PIE-APT (Abductive Planning for TDKGs)--operating natively on the expressive SROIQ Description Logic. Modeling state transitions as non-monotonic updates to deductively closed DL theories, we represent actions natively in OWL. This leverages an incremental reasoner to preserve decidability and natively bypass the Ramification Problem. To address incomplete knowledge, PIE-Abducer circumvents Minimal Hitting Set (MHS) enumeration. Instead of combinatorial search, it injects the logical negation of a goal into a consistent DL branch and synthesizes missing premises via direct refutation consequences. PIE-APT employs a recursive Generate-and-Test architecture, interleaving backward-chaining A* search with PIE-Abducer to synthesize both action sequences and abductive assumptions. Candidates undergo strict validation via forward-chaining Temporal Projection to evaluate logical trajectories. We evaluate four OWL benchmarks targeting semantic abilities missing from classical planning: parameterized goals with witness search, mid-search DL entailment, open-world assumption injection, and adversarial plan synthesis. Results show qualitative superiority over classical planners and prove our direct-derivation approach significantly outperforms an MHS-faithful baseline in abductive enrichment.

  • 2 authors
·
Sep 1

Can We Trust Embodied Agents? Exploring Backdoor Attacks against Embodied LLM-based Decision-Making Systems

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown significant promise in real-world decision-making tasks for embodied artificial intelligence, especially when fine-tuned to leverage their inherent common sense and reasoning abilities while being tailored to specific applications. However, this fine-tuning process introduces considerable safety and security vulnerabilities, especially in safety-critical cyber-physical systems. In this work, we propose the first comprehensive framework for Backdoor Attacks against LLM-based Decision-making systems (BALD) in embodied AI, systematically exploring the attack surfaces and trigger mechanisms. Specifically, we propose three distinct attack mechanisms: word injection, scenario manipulation, and knowledge injection, targeting various components in the LLM-based decision-making pipeline. We perform extensive experiments on representative LLMs (GPT-3.5, LLaMA2, PaLM2) in autonomous driving and home robot tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness and stealthiness of our backdoor triggers across various attack channels, with cases like vehicles accelerating toward obstacles and robots placing knives on beds. Our word and knowledge injection attacks achieve nearly 100% success rate across multiple models and datasets while requiring only limited access to the system. Our scenario manipulation attack yields success rates exceeding 65%, reaching up to 90%, and does not require any runtime system intrusion. We also assess the robustness of these attacks against defenses, revealing their resilience. Our findings highlight critical security vulnerabilities in embodied LLM systems and emphasize the urgent need for safeguarding these systems to mitigate potential risks.

  • 8 authors
·
Apr 29, 2025

Learning Plug-and-play Memory for Guiding Video Diffusion Models

Diffusion Transformer(DiT) based video generation models have recently achieved impressive visual quality and temporal coherence, but they still frequently violate basic physical laws and commonsense dynamics, revealing a lack of explicit world knowledge. In this work, we explore how to equip them with a plug-and-play memory that injects useful world knowledge. Motivated by in-context memory in Transformer-based LLMs, we conduct empirical studies to show that DiT can be steered via interventions on its hidden states, and simple low-pass and high-pass filters in the embedding space naturally disentangle low-level appearance and high-level physical/semantic cues, enabling targeted guidance. Building on these observations, we propose a learnable memory encoder DiT-Mem, composed of stacked 3D CNNs, low-/high-pass filters, and self-attention layers. The encoder maps reference videos into a compact set of memory tokens, which are concatenated as the memory within the DiT self-attention layers. During training, we keep the diffusion backbone frozen, and only optimize the memory encoder. It yields a rather efficient training process on few training parameters (150M) and 10K data samples, and enables plug-and-play usage at inference time. Extensive experiments on state-of-the-art models demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in improving physical rule following and video fidelity. Our code and data are publicly released here: https://thrcle421.github.io/DiT-Mem-Web/.

  • 7 authors
·
Nov 24, 2025

PointVLA: Injecting the 3D World into Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models excel at robotic tasks by leveraging large-scale 2D vision-language pretraining, but their reliance on RGB images limits spatial reasoning critical for real-world interaction. Retraining these models with 3D data is computationally prohibitive, while discarding existing 2D datasets wastes valuable resources. To bridge this gap, we propose PointVLA, a framework that enhances pre-trained VLAs with point cloud inputs without requiring retraining. Our method freezes the vanilla action expert and injects 3D features via a lightweight modular block. To identify the most effective way of integrating point cloud representations, we conduct a skip-block analysis to pinpoint less useful blocks in the vanilla action expert, ensuring that 3D features are injected only into these blocks--minimizing disruption to pre-trained representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PointVLA outperforms state-of-the-art 2D imitation learning methods, such as OpenVLA, Diffusion Policy and DexVLA, across both simulated and real-world robotic tasks. Specifically, we highlight several key advantages of PointVLA enabled by point cloud integration: (1) Few-shot multi-tasking, where PointVLA successfully performs four different tasks using only 20 demonstrations each; (2) Real-vs-photo discrimination, where PointVLA distinguishes real objects from their images, leveraging 3D world knowledge to improve safety and reliability; (3) Height adaptability, Unlike conventional 2D imitation learning methods, PointVLA enables robots to adapt to objects at varying table height that unseen in train data. Furthermore, PointVLA achieves strong performance in long-horizon tasks, such as picking and packing objects from a moving conveyor belt, showcasing its ability to generalize across complex, dynamic environments.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 10, 2025

Knowledge-enhanced Agents for Interactive Text Games

Communication via natural language is a crucial aspect of intelligence, and it requires computational models to learn and reason about world concepts, with varying levels of supervision. While there has been significant progress made on fully-supervised non-interactive tasks, such as question-answering and procedural text understanding, much of the community has turned to various sequential interactive tasks, as in semi-Markov text-based games, which have revealed limitations of existing approaches in terms of coherence, contextual awareness, and their ability to learn effectively from the environment. In this paper, we propose a framework for enabling improved functional grounding of agents in text-based games. Specifically, we consider two forms of domain knowledge that we inject into learning-based agents: memory of previous correct actions and affordances of relevant objects in the environment. Our framework supports three representative model classes: `pure' reinforcement learning (RL) agents, RL agents enhanced with knowledge graphs, and agents equipped with language models. Furthermore, we devise multiple injection strategies for the above domain knowledge types and agent architectures, including injection via knowledge graphs and augmentation of the existing input encoding strategies. We perform all experiments on the ScienceWorld text-based game environment, to illustrate the performance of various model configurations in challenging science-related instruction-following tasks. Our findings provide crucial insights on the development of effective natural language processing systems for interactive contexts.

  • 5 authors
·
May 8, 2023

Agent Planning with World Knowledge Model

Recent endeavors towards directly using large language models (LLMs) as agent models to execute interactive planning tasks have shown commendable results. Despite their achievements, however, they still struggle with brainless trial-and-error in global planning and generating hallucinatory actions in local planning due to their poor understanding of the ''real'' physical world. Imitating humans' mental world knowledge model which provides global prior knowledge before the task and maintains local dynamic knowledge during the task, in this paper, we introduce parametric World Knowledge Model (WKM) to facilitate agent planning. Concretely, we steer the agent model to self-synthesize knowledge from both expert and sampled trajectories. Then we develop WKM, providing prior task knowledge to guide the global planning and dynamic state knowledge to assist the local planning. Experimental results on three complex real-world simulated datasets with three state-of-the-art open-source LLMs, Mistral-7B, Gemma-7B, and Llama-3-8B, demonstrate that our method can achieve superior performance compared to various strong baselines. Besides, we analyze to illustrate that our WKM can effectively alleviate the blind trial-and-error and hallucinatory action issues, providing strong support for the agent's understanding of the world. Other interesting findings include: 1) our instance-level task knowledge can generalize better to unseen tasks, 2) weak WKM can guide strong agent model planning, and 3) unified WKM training has promising potential for further development. Code will be available at https://github.com/zjunlp/WKM.

  • 10 authors
·
May 23, 2024

Can Editing LLMs Inject Harm?

Knowledge editing techniques have been increasingly adopted to efficiently correct the false or outdated knowledge in Large Language Models (LLMs), due to the high cost of retraining from scratch. Meanwhile, one critical but under-explored question is: can knowledge editing be used to inject harm into LLMs? In this paper, we propose to reformulate knowledge editing as a new type of safety threat for LLMs, namely Editing Attack, and conduct a systematic investigation with a newly constructed dataset EditAttack. Specifically, we focus on two typical safety risks of Editing Attack including Misinformation Injection and Bias Injection. For the risk of misinformation injection, we first categorize it into commonsense misinformation injection and long-tail misinformation injection. Then, we find that editing attacks can inject both types of misinformation into LLMs, and the effectiveness is particularly high for commonsense misinformation injection. For the risk of bias injection, we discover that not only can biased sentences be injected into LLMs with high effectiveness, but also one single biased sentence injection can cause a high bias increase in general outputs of LLMs, which are even highly irrelevant to the injected sentence, indicating a catastrophic impact on the overall fairness of LLMs. Then, we further illustrate the high stealthiness of editing attacks, measured by their impact on the general knowledge and reasoning capacities of LLMs, and show the hardness of defending editing attacks with empirical evidence. Our discoveries demonstrate the emerging misuse risks of knowledge editing techniques on compromising the safety alignment of LLMs.

  • 15 authors
·
Jul 29, 2024

Scaling Laws for Hypernetwork-Based Knowledge Injection in Large Language Models

Injecting factual knowledge into large language models (LLMs) reliably and at scale remains an open challenge. Hypernetworks provide a promising solution to large-scale knowledge injection. Although hypernetworks are typically applied for test-time adaptation, we explore their use in train-time knowledge injection, where, given a large corpus of facts, we train a hypernetwork to generate a fixed LoRA adapter that, when inserted into the target model, enable the model to answer questions about those facts. In this work, we investigate whether hypernetworks can be used to perform train-time knowledge injection and how this ability varies with scale. The scaling behavior of hypernetworks remains largely unstudied. Our design decouples the hypernetwork's injection capacity from the target model's general capability, enabling, for the first time, a rigorous study of scaling laws for hypernetwork architectures. We characterize how loss, reasoning accuracy, and out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization vary with hypernetwork depth, width, and target network size. We construct a large-scale dataset, called MegaWikiQA, containing tens of millions of multi-hop question-answer examples across 39 domains constructed from examples in Wikidata5M. Our results reveal: (i) hypernetwork-based injection exhibits broadly predictive power law scaling along all architecture axes; and (ii) hypernetworks are capable of reliable OOD generalization at increasing scales, suggesting that hypernetwork provides a promising alternative to other train-time adaptation methods such as LoRA finetuning and full fine-tuning, exhibiting steeper scaling exponents in all OOD evaluations. Together, these results establish hypernetworks as a principled and scalable substrate for train-time adaptation, and provide the first empirically grounded scaling laws to guide hypernetworks for factual reasoning in large language models.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 20 1

Flooding Spread of Manipulated Knowledge in LLM-Based Multi-Agent Communities

The rapid adoption of large language models (LLMs) in multi-agent systems has highlighted their impressive capabilities in various applications, such as collaborative problem-solving and autonomous negotiation. However, the security implications of these LLM-based multi-agent systems have not been thoroughly investigated, particularly concerning the spread of manipulated knowledge. In this paper, we investigate this critical issue by constructing a detailed threat model and a comprehensive simulation environment that mirrors real-world multi-agent deployments in a trusted platform. Subsequently, we propose a novel two-stage attack method involving Persuasiveness Injection and Manipulated Knowledge Injection to systematically explore the potential for manipulated knowledge (i.e., counterfactual and toxic knowledge) spread without explicit prompt manipulation. Our method leverages the inherent vulnerabilities of LLMs in handling world knowledge, which can be exploited by attackers to unconsciously spread fabricated information. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our attack method can successfully induce LLM-based agents to spread both counterfactual and toxic knowledge without degrading their foundational capabilities during agent communication. Furthermore, we show that these manipulations can persist through popular retrieval-augmented generation frameworks, where several benign agents store and retrieve manipulated chat histories for future interactions. This persistence indicates that even after the interaction has ended, the benign agents may continue to be influenced by manipulated knowledge. Our findings reveal significant security risks in LLM-based multi-agent systems, emphasizing the imperative need for robust defenses against manipulated knowledge spread, such as introducing ``guardian'' agents and advanced fact-checking tools.

  • 10 authors
·
Jul 10, 2024

MM-PoisonRAG: Disrupting Multimodal RAG with Local and Global Poisoning Attacks

Multimodal large language models with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) have significantly advanced tasks such as multimodal question answering by grounding responses in external text and images. This grounding improves factuality, reduces hallucination, and extends reasoning beyond parametric knowledge. However, this reliance on external knowledge poses a critical yet underexplored safety risk: knowledge poisoning attacks, where adversaries deliberately inject adversarial multimodal content into external knowledge bases to steer model toward generating incorrect or even harmful responses. To expose such vulnerabilities, we propose MM-PoisonRAG, the first framework to systematically design knowledge poisoning in multimodal RAG. We introduce two complementary attack strategies: Localized Poisoning Attack (LPA), which implants targeted multimodal misinformation to manipulate specific queries, and Globalized Poisoning Attack (GPA), which inserts a single adversarial knowledge to broadly disrupt reasoning and induce nonsensical responses across all queries. Comprehensive experiments across tasks, models, and access settings show that LPA achieves targeted manipulation with attack success rates of up to 56%, while GPA completely disrupts model generation to 0% accuracy with just a single adversarial knowledge injection. Our results reveal the fragility of multimodal RAG and highlight the urgent need for defenses against knowledge poisoning.

  • 9 authors
·
Feb 24, 2025

SynthWorlds: Controlled Parallel Worlds for Disentangling Reasoning and Knowledge in Language Models

Evaluating the reasoning ability of language models (LMs) is complicated by their extensive parametric world knowledge, where benchmark performance often reflects factual recall rather than genuine reasoning. Existing datasets and approaches (e.g., temporal filtering, paraphrasing, adversarial substitution) cannot cleanly separate the two. We present SynthWorlds, a framework that disentangles task reasoning complexity from factual knowledge. In SynthWorlds, we construct parallel corpora representing two worlds with identical interconnected structure: a real-mapped world, where models may exploit parametric knowledge, and a synthetic-mapped world, where such knowledge is meaningless. On top of these corpora, we design two mirrored tasks as case studies: multi-hop question answering and page navigation, which maintain equal reasoning difficulty across worlds. Experiments in parametric-only (e.g., closed-book QA) and knowledge-augmented (e.g., retrieval-augmented) LM settings reveal a persistent knowledge advantage gap, defined as the performance boost models gain from memorized parametric world knowledge. Knowledge acquisition and integration mechanisms reduce but do not eliminate this gap, highlighting opportunities for system improvements. Fully automatic and scalable, SynthWorlds provides a controlled environment for evaluating LMs in ways that were previously challenging, enabling precise and testable comparisons of reasoning and memorization.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 28, 2025

MoKus: Leveraging Cross-Modal Knowledge Transfer for Knowledge-Aware Concept Customization

Concept customization typically binds rare tokens to a target concept. Unfortunately, these approaches often suffer from unstable performance as the pretraining data seldom contains these rare tokens. Meanwhile, these rare tokens fail to convey the inherent knowledge of the target concept. Consequently, we introduce Knowledge-aware Concept Customization, a novel task aiming at binding diverse textual knowledge to target visual concepts. This task requires the model to identify the knowledge within the text prompt to perform high-fidelity customized generation. Meanwhile, the model should efficiently bind all the textual knowledge to the target concept. Therefore, we propose MoKus, a novel framework for knowledge-aware concept customization. Our framework relies on a key observation: cross-modal knowledge transfer, where modifying knowledge within the text modality naturally transfers to the visual modality during generation. Inspired by this observation, MoKus contains two stages: (1) In visual concept learning, we first learn the anchor representation to store the visual information of the target concept. (2) In textual knowledge updating, we update the answer for the knowledge queries to the anchor representation, enabling high-fidelity customized generation. To further comprehensively evaluate our proposed MoKus on the new task, we introduce the first benchmark for knowledge-aware concept customization: KnowCusBench. Extensive evaluations have demonstrated that MoKus outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, the cross-model knowledge transfer allows MoKus to be easily extended to other knowledge-aware applications like virtual concept creation and concept erasure. We also demonstrate the capability of our method to achieve improvements on world knowledge benchmarks.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 13 3

Towards Continual Knowledge Learning of Language Models

Large Language Models (LMs) are known to encode world knowledge in their parameters as they pretrain on a vast amount of web corpus, which is often utilized for performing knowledge-dependent downstream tasks such as question answering, fact-checking, and open dialogue. In real-world scenarios, the world knowledge stored in the LMs can quickly become outdated as the world changes, but it is non-trivial to avoid catastrophic forgetting and reliably acquire new knowledge while preserving invariant knowledge. To push the community towards better maintenance of ever-changing LMs, we formulate a new continual learning (CL) problem called Continual Knowledge Learning (CKL). We construct a new benchmark and metric to quantify the retention of time-invariant world knowledge, the update of outdated knowledge, and the acquisition of new knowledge. We adopt applicable recent methods from literature to create several strong baselines. Through extensive experiments, we find that CKL exhibits unique challenges that are not addressed in previous CL setups, where parameter expansion is necessary to reliably retain and learn knowledge simultaneously. By highlighting the critical causes of knowledge forgetting, we show that CKL is a challenging and important problem that helps us better understand and train ever-changing LMs. The benchmark datasets, evaluation script, and baseline code to reproduce our results are available at https://github.com/joeljang/continual-knowledge-learning.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 7, 2021

LoRAMoE: Revolutionizing Mixture of Experts for Maintaining World Knowledge in Language Model Alignment

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a crucial step for large language models (LLMs), enabling them to align with human instructions and enhance their capabilities in downstream tasks. When the models are required to align with a broader range of downstream tasks, or there is a desire to notably improve the performance on a specific task, a substantial increase in fine-tuning data often emerges as the solution. However, we find that large-scale increases in instruction data can disrupt the world knowledge previously stored in the LLMs, i.e., world knowledge forgetting. In this paper, we introduce LoRAMoE to address the above challenge. The LoRAMoE is a plugin version of Mixture of Experts (MoE). The plugin form ensures the integrity of world knowledge by freezing the backbone model during the training phase. We then propose the use of localized balancing constraints to coordinate parts of experts for task utilization, meanwhile enabling other experts to fully leverage the world knowledge stored in the models. Experimental results demonstrate that LoRAMoE can reasonably coordinate experts based on data type during inference, and even dramatically increasing instruction data does not result in knowledge forgetting. Moreover, LoRAMoE provides additional benefits for the performance of downstream tasks, indicating the potential of our approach for multi-task learning.

  • 16 authors
·
Dec 15, 2023

InsPLAD: A Dataset and Benchmark for Power Line Asset Inspection in UAV Images

Power line maintenance and inspection are essential to avoid power supply interruptions, reducing its high social and financial impacts yearly. Automating power line visual inspections remains a relevant open problem for the industry due to the lack of public real-world datasets of power line components and their various defects to foster new research. This paper introduces InsPLAD, a Power Line Asset Inspection Dataset and Benchmark containing 10,607 high-resolution Unmanned Aerial Vehicles colour images. The dataset contains seventeen unique power line assets captured from real-world operating power lines. Additionally, five of those assets present six defects: four of which are corrosion, one is a broken component, and one is a bird's nest presence. All assets were labelled according to their condition, whether normal or the defect name found on an image level. We thoroughly evaluate state-of-the-art and popular methods for three image-level computer vision tasks covered by InsPLAD: object detection, through the AP metric; defect classification, through Balanced Accuracy; and anomaly detection, through the AUROC metric. InsPLAD offers various vision challenges from uncontrolled environments, such as multi-scale objects, multi-size class instances, multiple objects per image, intra-class variation, cluttered background, distinct point-of-views, perspective distortion, occlusion, and varied lighting conditions. To the best of our knowledge, InsPLAD is the first large real-world dataset and benchmark for power line asset inspection with multiple components and defects for various computer vision tasks, with a potential impact to improve state-of-the-art methods in the field. It will be publicly available in its integrity on a repository with a thorough description. It can be found at https://github.com/andreluizbvs/InsPLAD.

  • 8 authors
·
Dec 3, 2023

Bongard-OpenWorld: Few-Shot Reasoning for Free-form Visual Concepts in the Real World

We introduce Bongard-OpenWorld, a new benchmark for evaluating real-world few-shot reasoning for machine vision. It originates from the classical Bongard Problems (BPs): Given two sets of images (positive and negative), the model needs to identify the set that query images belong to by inducing the visual concepts, which is exclusively depicted by images from the positive set. Our benchmark inherits the few-shot concept induction of the original BPs while adding the two novel layers of challenge: 1) open-world free-form concepts, as the visual concepts in Bongard-OpenWorld are unique compositions of terms from an open vocabulary, ranging from object categories to abstract visual attributes and commonsense factual knowledge; 2) real-world images, as opposed to the synthetic diagrams used by many counterparts. In our exploration, Bongard-OpenWorld already imposes a significant challenge to current few-shot reasoning algorithms. We further investigate to which extent the recently introduced Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) can solve our task, by directly probing VLMs, and combining VLMs and LLMs in an interactive reasoning scheme. We even designed a neuro-symbolic reasoning approach that reconciles LLMs & VLMs with logical reasoning to emulate the human problem-solving process for Bongard Problems. However, none of these approaches manage to close the human-machine gap, as the best learner achieves 64% accuracy while human participants easily reach 91%. We hope Bongard-OpenWorld can help us better understand the limitations of current visual intelligence and facilitate future research on visual agents with stronger few-shot visual reasoning capabilities.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 16, 2023

World knowledge-enhanced Reasoning Using Instruction-guided Interactor in Autonomous Driving

The Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) with extensive world knowledge have revitalized autonomous driving, particularly in reasoning tasks within perceivable regions. However, when faced with perception-limited areas (dynamic or static occlusion regions), MLLMs struggle to effectively integrate perception ability with world knowledge for reasoning. These perception-limited regions can conceal crucial safety information, especially for vulnerable road users. In this paper, we propose a framework, which aims to improve autonomous driving performance under perceptionlimited conditions by enhancing the integration of perception capabilities and world knowledge. Specifically, we propose a plug-and-play instruction-guided interaction module that bridges modality gaps and significantly reduces the input sequence length, allowing it to adapt effectively to multi-view video inputs. Furthermore, to better integrate world knowledge with driving-related tasks, we have collected and refined a large-scale multi-modal dataset that includes 2 million natural language QA pairs, 1.7 million grounding task data. To evaluate the model's utilization of world knowledge, we introduce an object-level risk assessment dataset comprising 200K QA pairs, where the questions necessitate multi-step reasoning leveraging world knowledge for resolution. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

  • 10 authors
·
Dec 9, 2024

CXR-AD: Component X-ray Image Dataset for Industrial Anomaly Detection

Internal defect detection constitutes a critical process in ensuring component quality, for which anomaly detection serves as an effective solution. However, existing anomaly detection datasets predominantly focus on surface defects in visible-light images, lacking publicly available X-ray datasets targeting internal defects in components. To address this gap, we construct the first publicly accessible component X-ray anomaly detection (CXR-AD) dataset, comprising real-world X-ray images. The dataset covers five industrial component categories, including 653 normal samples and 561 defect samples with precise pixel-level mask annotations. We systematically analyze the dataset characteristics and identify three major technical challenges: (1) strong coupling between complex internal structures and defect regions, (2) inherent low contrast and high noise interference in X-ray imaging, and (3) significant variations in defect scales and morphologies. To evaluate dataset complexity, we benchmark three state-of-the-art anomaly detection frameworks (feature-based, reconstruction-based, and zero-shot learning methods). Experimental results demonstrate a 29.78% average performance degradation on CXR-AD compared to MVTec AD, highlighting the limitations of current algorithms in handling internal defect detection tasks. To the best of our knowledge, CXR-AD represents the first publicly available X-ray dataset for component anomaly detection, providing a real-world industrial benchmark to advance algorithm development and enhance precision in internal defect inspection technologies.

  • 6 authors
·
May 5, 2025

Knowledge-Centric Agents for Workflow Generation in ComfyUI

Workflow generation in visual creation systems such as ComfyUI demands not only syntactic accuracy but also expert-level reasoning over modular compositions. Existing large language model (LLM) approaches often treat this as a direct text-to-JSON generation task, struggling with structural brittleness and lacking the experiential knowledge required for effective design. We argue that successful workflow generation requires modeling knowledge itself, including its structure, hierarchy, and reasoning dynamics. To this end, we propose a knowledge-centric framework that learns to invert, inject, and infer with knowledge across multiple abstraction levels. We first perform knowledge inversion to distill hierarchical representations, ranging from full pseudo-codes and skeletons to high-level strategies, from large collections of real-world workflows. We then conduct knowledge injection through supervised fine-tuning, teaching the model to reason from task descriptions to strategies and from strategies to executable structures. During inference, the model performs reversible reasoning to synthesize executable workflows, augmented by self-refinement for structural coherence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method produces workflows with richer node diversity, more coherent structures, and higher execution success rates than existing systems, establishing a new foundation for knowledge-driven, agentic workflow generation.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 26

Knowledge Infused Decoding

Pre-trained language models (LMs) have been shown to memorize a substantial amount of knowledge from the pre-training corpora; however, they are still limited in recalling factually correct knowledge given a certain context. Hence, they tend to suffer from counterfactual or hallucinatory generation when used in knowledge-intensive natural language generation (NLG) tasks. Recent remedies to this problem focus on modifying either the pre-training or task fine-tuning objectives to incorporate knowledge, which normally require additional costly training or architecture modification of LMs for practical applications. We present Knowledge Infused Decoding (KID) -- a novel decoding algorithm for generative LMs, which dynamically infuses external knowledge into each step of the LM decoding. Specifically, we maintain a local knowledge memory based on the current context, interacting with a dynamically created external knowledge trie, and continuously update the local memory as a knowledge-aware constraint to guide decoding via reinforcement learning. On six diverse knowledge-intensive NLG tasks, task-agnostic LMs (e.g., GPT-2 and BART) armed with KID outperform many task-optimized state-of-the-art models, and show particularly strong performance in few-shot scenarios over seven related knowledge-infusion techniques. Human evaluation confirms KID's ability to generate more relevant and factual language for the input context when compared with multiple baselines. Finally, KID also alleviates exposure bias and provides stable generation quality when generating longer sequences. Code for KID is available at https://github.com/microsoft/KID.

  • 8 authors
·
Apr 6, 2022

PoisonedRAG: Knowledge Corruption Attacks to Retrieval-Augmented Generation of Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success due to their exceptional generative capabilities. Despite their success, they also have inherent limitations such as a lack of up-to-date knowledge and hallucination. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is a state-of-the-art technique to mitigate these limitations. The key idea of RAG is to ground the answer generation of an LLM on external knowledge retrieved from a knowledge database. Existing studies mainly focus on improving the accuracy or efficiency of RAG, leaving its security largely unexplored. We aim to bridge the gap in this work. We find that the knowledge database in a RAG system introduces a new and practical attack surface. Based on this attack surface, we propose PoisonedRAG, the first knowledge corruption attack to RAG, where an attacker could inject a few malicious texts into the knowledge database of a RAG system to induce an LLM to generate an attacker-chosen target answer for an attacker-chosen target question. We formulate knowledge corruption attacks as an optimization problem, whose solution is a set of malicious texts. Depending on the background knowledge (e.g., black-box and white-box settings) of an attacker on a RAG system, we propose two solutions to solve the optimization problem, respectively. Our results show PoisonedRAG could achieve a 90% attack success rate when injecting five malicious texts for each target question into a knowledge database with millions of texts. We also evaluate several defenses and our results show they are insufficient to defend against PoisonedRAG, highlighting the need for new defenses.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 12, 2024

Absorbing Complexity: An Interaction-Native Knowledge Harness for Financial LLM Agents

Financial AI agents often fail for a simple reason: they make users carry the complexity. A user must repeatedly restate goals, risk preferences, portfolio context, past judgments, and shifting market assumptions, while the agent answers, retrieves, acts, and forgets. In finance, this is not just inconvenient. In tasks such as market analysis, copy-trading review, and trade preparation, forgotten context and stale memory can create latency, repeated errors, weak auditability, and unsafe decisions. We propose the interaction-native knowledge harness (InKH), an architecture for financial LLM agents that absorbs complexity into the system. InKH converts user, market, portfolio, and tool events into structured operational knowledge. It uses passive knowledge injection to assemble a bounded working context buffer before the main model step, temporal graph memory for low-latency retrieval, a wiki audit surface for human-readable governance, and background extraction with maturity, decay, and write-time invalidation. We evaluate InKH on a reproducible controlled synthetic benchmark with 24 random seeds, 4 rounds, 80 episodes per round, and 6 baselines, producing 46,080 baseline-conditioned evaluations. InKH achieves mean task quality of 0.815 at 900 ms latency. Compared with agent-driven wiki-walk memory, it reduces latency by 82.95 percent, token cost by 82.29 percent, and stale-knowledge usage by 96.58 percent, while improving quality by 0.108 and traceability by 0.461. Compared with a temporal-graph system without invalidation, it improves quality by 0.050 and reduces stale-memory usage by 96.58 percent with comparable serving cost. The results support a design thesis for financial AI: adoption happens when complexity is absorbed by the system rather than transferred to the user. The benchmark validates architecture-level behavior, not live trading performance.

inc4-net INC4
·
May 31 3

MixSD: Mixed Contextual Self-Distillation for Knowledge Injection

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is widely used to inject new knowledge into language models, but it often degrades pretrained capabilities such as reasoning and general-domain performance. We argue this forgetting arises because fine-tuning targets from humans or external systems diverge from the model's autoregressive distribution, forcing the optimizer to imitate low-probability token sequences. To address this problem, we propose MixSD, a simple external-teacher-free method for distribution-aligned knowledge injection. Instead of training on fixed targets, MixSD constructs supervision dynamically by mixing tokens from two conditionals of the base model itself: an expert conditional that observes the injected fact in context, and a naive conditional that reflects the model's original prior. The resulting supervision sequences preserve the factual learning signal while remaining substantially closer to the base model's distribution. We evaluate MixSD on two synthetic corpora that we construct to study factual recall and arithmetic function acquisition in a controlled setting, together with established benchmarks for open-domain factual question answering and knowledge editing. Across multiple model scales and settings, MixSD consistently achieves a better memorization-retention trade-off compared to SFT and on-policy self distillation baselines, retaining up to 100% of the base model's held-out capability while maintaining near-perfect training accuracy, whereas standard SFT retains as little as 1%. We further show that MixSD produces substantially lower-NLL supervision targets under the base model and reduces harmful movement along Fisher-sensitive parameter directions. These results suggest that aligning supervision with the model's native generation distribution is a simple and effective principle for knowledge injection that mitigates catastrophic forgetting.

The Mechanism Matters: When Knowledge Graphs Help Reinforcement Learning

Knowledge graphs (KGs) are widely used to inject prior knowledge into reinforcement learning (RL), yet the literature is dominated by single-domain, positive-result method papers, so we lack a systematic account of when KG structure helps an agent, when it is neutral, and when it hurts. We conduct a controlled study that independently varies the RL task, the injection mechanism (state features, action masking, or potential-based reward shaping), and KG quality. Using a synthetic, fully controllable KG over MiniGrid environments, we report three findings. First, on compositional sparse-reward tasks structured KG guidance improves sample efficiency and solve reliability (70% to 97% of seeds), and a shuffle control that permutes the KG's edges while preserving their count collapses the benefit toward baseline (masking p=0.0001; shaping p=0.006), so the gain is structural rather than generic regularization. Second, KG value scales with the amount of task-relevant knowledge the graph contains. Third, and most consequential, safety depends on the mechanism: soft, optimality-preserving injection benefits from correct knowledge and harmlessly ignores incorrect knowledge, whereas hard masking is brittle, forbidding essential actions when the KG is incomplete or corrupted and making a wrong KG worse than none. A UMLS-derived clinical case study on sepsis management under offline RL is a careful null, underscoring that benefits require task structure the chosen mechanism can exploit. Our results give practitioners concrete guidance on how, and how much, to trust a KG when using it to guide RL.

  • 1 authors
·
Jul 20

Parametric Retrieval Augmented Generation

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques have emerged as a promising solution to enhance the reliability of large language models (LLMs) by addressing issues like hallucinations, outdated knowledge, and domain adaptation. In particular, existing RAG methods append relevant documents retrieved from external corpus or databases to the input of LLMs to guide their generation process, which we refer to as the in-context knowledge injection method. While this approach is simple and often effective, it has inherent limitations. Firstly, increasing the context length and number of relevant documents can lead to higher computational overhead and degraded performance, especially in complex reasoning tasks. More importantly, in-context knowledge injection operates primarily at the input level, but LLMs store their internal knowledge in their parameters. This gap fundamentally limits the capacity of in-context methods. To this end, we introduce Parametric retrieval-augmented generation (Parametric RAG), a new RAG paradigm that integrates external knowledge directly into the parameters of feed-forward networks (FFN) of an LLM through document parameterization. This approach not only saves online computational costs by eliminating the need to inject multiple documents into the LLMs' input context, but also deepens the integration of external knowledge into the parametric knowledge space of the LLM. Experimental results demonstrate that Parametric RAG substantially enhances both the effectiveness and efficiency of knowledge augmentation in LLMs. Also, it can be combined with in-context RAG methods to achieve even better performance. We have open-sourced all the code, data, and models in the following anonymized GitHub link: https://github.com/oneal2000/PRAG

  • 9 authors
·
Jan 27, 2025

Adapting While Learning: Grounding LLMs for Scientific Problems with Intelligent Tool Usage Adaptation

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate promising capabilities in solving simple scientific problems but often produce hallucinations for complex ones. While integrating LLMs with tools can increase reliability, this approach typically results in over-reliance on tools, diminishing the model's ability to solve simple problems through basic reasoning. In contrast, human experts first assess problem complexity using domain knowledge before choosing an appropriate solution approach. Inspired by this human problem-solving process, we propose a novel two-component fine-tuning method. In the first component World Knowledge Distillation (WKD), LLMs learn directly from solutions generated using tool's information to internalize domain knowledge. In the second component Tool Usage Adaptation (TUA), we partition problems into easy and hard categories based on the model's direct answering accuracy. While maintaining the same alignment target for easy problems as in WKD, we train the model to intelligently switch to tool usage for more challenging problems. We validate our method on six scientific benchmark datasets, spanning mathematics, climate science and epidemiology. On average, our models demonstrate a 28.18% improvement in answer accuracy and a 13.89% increase in tool usage precision across all datasets, surpassing state-of-the-art models including GPT-4o and Claude-3.5.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 1, 2024 3

Steering Black-Box Large Language Model Agents with Pitfall Anticipation World Model

Frontier black-box Large Language Model (LLM) agents are proficient at long-horizon reasoning and precise action generation. However, when it comes to a specific agentic task, they have no internalized knowledge of how that particular environment unfolds. A world model offers a natural remedy, providing the agent with environment specific knowledge by foreseeing how the environment will respond to the action it is about to take. Prior world models for LLM agents mainly predict next observations at each step, which is costly and often uninformative because individual observations provide limited task-relevant guidance and not every step requires call for foresight. This raises a key question: what a world model should predict and when should it be invoked for agentic tasks? Our pilot study suggests that world model guidance is most useful when it anticipates pitfalls within a bounded multi-step future. Motivated by this, we introduce Pitfall Anticipation World Model (PAWM), which selectively intervenes when a potential pitfall arises and predicts the impending failure to steer the agent away from it. PAWM is trained in two stages: Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on synthetic data labeled with agent pitfalls, followed by GRPO co-training with a black-box LLM to further optimize it in the target environment. PAWM improves Claude Sonnet 4.5 performance by 24.3% on ScienceWorld and 7.7% on WebArena-Lite, outperforming a range of baselines. These results demonstrate that PAWM provides an effective form of world model guidance for black-box LLM agents.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 20 1

Establishing Knowledge Preference in Language Models

Language models are known to encode a great amount of factual knowledge through pretraining. However, such knowledge might be insufficient to cater to user requests, requiring the model to integrate external knowledge sources and adhere to user-provided specifications. When answering questions about ongoing events, the model should use recent news articles to update its response; when asked to provide recommendations, the model should prioritize user specifications over retrieved product reviews; when some facts are edited in the model, the updated facts should override all prior knowledge learned by the model even if they are conflicting. In all of the cases above, the model faces a decision between its own parametric knowledge, (retrieved) contextual knowledge, and user instruction knowledge. In this paper, we (1) unify such settings into the problem of knowledge preference and define a three-level preference hierarchy over these knowledge sources; (2) compile a collection of existing datasets IfQA, MQuAKE, and MRQA covering a combination of settings (with/without user specifications, with/without context documents) to systematically evaluate how well models obey the intended knowledge preference; and (3) propose a dataset synthesis method that composes diverse question-answer pairs with user assumptions and related context to directly fine-tune LMs for instilling the hierarchy of knowledge. We demonstrate that a 7B model, fine-tuned on only a few thousand examples automatically generated by our proposed method, effectively achieves superior performance (more than 18% improvement across all evaluation benchmarks) in adhering to the desired knowledge preference hierarchy.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 17, 2024

Knowledge Distillation via Token-level Relationship Graph

Knowledge distillation is a powerful technique for transferring knowledge from a pre-trained teacher model to a student model. However, the true potential of knowledge transfer has not been fully explored. Existing approaches primarily focus on distilling individual information or instance-level relationships, overlooking the valuable information embedded in token-level relationships, which may be particularly affected by the long-tail effects. To address the above limitations, we propose a novel method called Knowledge Distillation with Token-level Relationship Graph (TRG) that leverages the token-wise relational knowledge to enhance the performance of knowledge distillation. By employing TRG, the student model can effectively emulate higher-level semantic information from the teacher model, resulting in improved distillation results. To further enhance the learning process, we introduce a token-wise contextual loss called contextual loss, which encourages the student model to capture the inner-instance semantic contextual of the teacher model. We conduct experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method against several state-of-the-art approaches. Empirical results demonstrate the superiority of TRG across various visual classification tasks, including those involving imbalanced data. Our method consistently outperforms the existing baselines, establishing a new state-of-the-art performance in the field of knowledge distillation.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 20, 2023

Generation-Augmented Generation: A Plug-and-Play Framework for Private Knowledge Injection in Large Language Models

In domains such as biomedicine, materials, and finance, high-stakes deployment of large language models (LLMs) requires injecting private, domain-specific knowledge that is proprietary, fast-evolving, and under-represented in public pretraining. However, the two dominant paradigms for private knowledge injection each have pronounced drawbacks: fine-tuning is expensive to iterate, and continual updates risk catastrophic forgetting and general-capability regression; retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) keeps the base model intact but is brittle in specialized private corpora due to chunk-induced evidence fragmentation, retrieval drift, and long-context pressure that yields query-dependent prompt inflation. Inspired by how multimodal LLMs align heterogeneous modalities into a shared semantic space, we propose Generation-Augmented Generation (GAG), which treats private expertise as an additional expert modality and injects it via a compact, representation-level interface aligned to the frozen base model, avoiding prompt-time evidence serialization while enabling plug-and-play specialization and scalable multi-domain composition with reliable selective activation. Across two private scientific QA benchmarks (immunology adjuvant and catalytic materials) and mixed-domain evaluations, GAG improves specialist performance over strong RAG baselines by 15.34% and 14.86% on the two benchmarks, respectively, while maintaining performance on six open general benchmarks and enabling near-oracle selective activation for scalable multi-domain deployment.

  • 9 authors
·
Jan 12

Learning and Unlearning of Fabricated Knowledge in Language Models

What happens when a new piece of knowledge is introduced into the training data and how long does it last while a large language model (LM) continues to train? We investigate this question by injecting facts into LMs from a new probing dataset, "Outlandish", which is designed to permit the testing of a spectrum of different fact types. When studying how robust these memories are, there appears to be a sweet spot in the spectrum of fact novelty between consistency with world knowledge and total randomness, where the injected memory is the most enduring. Specifically we show that facts that conflict with common knowledge are remembered for tens of thousands of training steps, while prompts not conflicting with common knowledge (mundane), as well as scrambled prompts (randomly jumbled) are both forgotten much more rapidly. Further, knowledge-conflicting facts can "prime'' how the language model hallucinates on logically unrelated prompts, showing their propensity for non-target generalization, while both mundane and randomly jumbled facts prime significantly less. Finally, we show that impacts of knowledge-conflicting facts in LMs, though they can be long lasting, can be largely erased by novel application of multi-step sparse updates, even while the training ability of the model is preserved. As such, this very simple procedure has direct implications for mitigating the effects of data poisoning in training.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 28, 2024

Unify-Agent: A Unified Multimodal Agent for World-Grounded Image Synthesis

Unified multimodal models provide a natural and promising architecture for understanding diverse and complex real-world knowledge while generating high-quality images. However, they still rely primarily on frozen parametric knowledge, which makes them struggle with real-world image generation involving long-tail and knowledge-intensive concepts. Inspired by the broad success of agents on real-world tasks, we explore agentic modeling to address this limitation. Specifically, we present Unify-Agent, a unified multimodal agent for world-grounded image synthesis, which reframes image generation as an agentic pipeline consisting of prompt understanding, multimodal evidence searching, grounded recaptioning, and final synthesis. To train our model, we construct a tailored multimodal data pipeline and curate 143K high-quality agent trajectories for world-grounded image synthesis, enabling effective supervision over the full agentic generation process. We further introduce FactIP, a benchmark covering 12 categories of culturally significant and long-tail factual concepts that explicitly requires external knowledge grounding. Extensive experiments show that our proposed Unify-Agent substantially improves over its base unified model across diverse benchmarks and real world generation tasks, while approaching the world knowledge capabilities of the strongest closed-source models. As an early exploration of agent-based modeling for world-grounded image synthesis, our work highlights the value of tightly coupling reasoning, searching, and generation for reliable open-world agentic image synthesis.

A Knowledge-Injected Curriculum Pretraining Framework for Question Answering

Knowledge-based question answering (KBQA) is a key task in NLP research, and also an approach to access the web data and knowledge, which requires exploiting knowledge graphs (KGs) for reasoning. In the literature, one promising solution for KBQA is to incorporate the pretrained language model (LM) with KGs by generating KG-centered pretraining corpus, which has shown its superiority. However, these methods often depend on specific techniques and resources to work, which may not always be available and restrict its application. Moreover, existing methods focus more on improving language understanding with KGs, while neglect the more important human-like complex reasoning. To this end, in this paper, we propose a general Knowledge-Injected Curriculum Pretraining framework (KICP) to achieve comprehensive KG learning and exploitation for KBQA tasks, which is composed of knowledge injection (KI), knowledge adaptation (KA) and curriculum reasoning (CR). Specifically, the KI module first injects knowledge into the LM by generating KG-centered pretraining corpus, and generalizes the process into three key steps that could work with different implementations for flexible application. Next, the KA module learns knowledge from the generated corpus with LM equipped with an adapter as well as keeps its original natural language understanding ability to reduce the negative impacts of the difference between the generated and natural corpus. Last, to enable the LM with complex reasoning, the CR module follows human reasoning patterns to construct three corpora with increasing difficulties of reasoning, and further trains the LM from easy to hard in a curriculum manner. We provide an implementation of the general framework, and evaluate the proposed KICP on four real-word datasets. The results demonstrate that our framework can achieve higher performances.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 10, 2024

A Comprehensive Study of Knowledge Editing for Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown extraordinary capabilities in understanding and generating text that closely mirrors human communication. However, a primary limitation lies in the significant computational demands during training, arising from their extensive parameterization. This challenge is further intensified by the dynamic nature of the world, necessitating frequent updates to LLMs to correct outdated information or integrate new knowledge, thereby ensuring their continued relevance. Note that many applications demand continual model adjustments post-training to address deficiencies or undesirable behaviors. There is an increasing interest in efficient, lightweight methods for on-the-fly model modifications. To this end, recent years have seen a burgeoning in the techniques of knowledge editing for LLMs, which aim to efficiently modify LLMs' behaviors within specific domains while preserving overall performance across various inputs. In this paper, we first define the knowledge editing problem and then provide a comprehensive review of cutting-edge approaches. Drawing inspiration from educational and cognitive research theories, we propose a unified categorization criterion that classifies knowledge editing methods into three groups: resorting to external knowledge, merging knowledge into the model, and editing intrinsic knowledge. Furthermore, we introduce a new benchmark, KnowEdit, for a comprehensive empirical evaluation of representative knowledge editing approaches. Additionally, we provide an in-depth analysis of knowledge location, which can provide a deeper understanding of the knowledge structures inherent within LLMs. Finally, we discuss several potential applications of knowledge editing, outlining its broad and impactful implications.

  • 22 authors
·
Jan 2, 2024

Injecting Domain-Specific Knowledge into Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success in various tasks such as natural language understanding, text summarization, and machine translation. However, their general-purpose nature often limits their effectiveness in domain-specific applications that require specialized knowledge, such as healthcare, chemistry, or legal analysis. To address this, researchers have explored diverse methods to enhance LLMs by integrating domain-specific knowledge. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive overview of these methods, which we categorize into four key approaches: dynamic knowledge injection, static knowledge embedding, modular adapters, and prompt optimization. Each approach offers unique mechanisms to equip LLMs with domain expertise, balancing trade-offs between flexibility, scalability, and efficiency. We discuss how these methods enable LLMs to tackle specialized tasks, compare their advantages and disadvantages, evaluate domain-specific LLMs against general LLMs, and highlight the challenges and opportunities in this emerging field. For those interested in delving deeper into this area, we also summarize the commonly used datasets and benchmarks. To keep researchers updated on the latest studies, we maintain an open-source at: https://github.com/abilliyb/Knowledge_Injection_Survey_Papers, dedicated to documenting research in the field of specialized LLM.

  • 7 authors
·
Feb 15, 2025 2

Large Language Models with Controllable Working Memory

Large language models (LLMs) have led to a series of breakthroughs in natural language processing (NLP), owing to their excellent understanding and generation abilities. Remarkably, what further sets these models apart is the massive amounts of world knowledge they internalize during pretraining. While many downstream applications provide the model with an informational context to aid its performance on the underlying task, how the model's world knowledge interacts with the factual information presented in the context remains under explored. As a desirable behavior, an LLM should give precedence to the context whenever it contains task-relevant information that conflicts with the model's memorized knowledge. This enables model predictions to be grounded in the context, which can then be used to update or correct specific model predictions without frequent retraining. By contrast, when the context is irrelevant to the task, the model should ignore it and fall back on its internal knowledge. In this paper, we undertake a first joint study of the aforementioned two properties, namely controllability and robustness, in the context of LLMs. We demonstrate that state-of-the-art T5 and PaLM (both pretrained and finetuned) could exhibit poor controllability and robustness, which do not scale with increasing model size. As a solution, we propose a novel method - Knowledge Aware FineTuning (KAFT) - to strengthen both controllability and robustness by incorporating counterfactual and irrelevant contexts to standard supervised datasets. Our comprehensive evaluation showcases the utility of KAFT across model architectures and sizes.

  • 8 authors
·
Nov 9, 2022

World4RL: Diffusion World Models for Policy Refinement with Reinforcement Learning for Robotic Manipulation

Robotic manipulation policies are commonly initialized through imitation learning, but their performance is limited by the scarcity and narrow coverage of expert data. Reinforcement learning can refine polices to alleviate this limitation, yet real-robot training is costly and unsafe, while training in simulators suffers from the sim-to-real gap. Recent advances in generative models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in real-world simulation, with diffusion models in particular excelling at generation. This raises the question of how diffusion model-based world models can be combined to enhance pre-trained policies in robotic manipulation. In this work, we propose World4RL, a framework that employs diffusion-based world models as high-fidelity simulators to refine pre-trained policies entirely in imagined environments for robotic manipulation. Unlike prior works that primarily employ world models for planning, our framework enables direct end-to-end policy optimization. World4RL is designed around two principles: pre-training a diffusion world model that captures diverse dynamics on multi-task datasets and refining policies entirely within a frozen world model to avoid online real-world interactions. We further design a two-hot action encoding scheme tailored for robotic manipulation and adopt diffusion backbones to improve modeling fidelity. Extensive simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate that World4RL provides high-fidelity environment modeling and enables consistent policy refinement, yielding significantly higher success rates compared to imitation learning and other baselines. More visualization results are available at https://world4rl.github.io/.

  • 9 authors
·
Sep 23, 2025

MMMG: A Massive, Multidisciplinary, Multi-Tier Generation Benchmark for Text-to-Image Reasoning

In this paper, we introduce knowledge image generation as a new task, alongside the Massive Multi-Discipline Multi-Tier Knowledge-Image Generation Benchmark (MMMG) to probe the reasoning capability of image generation models. Knowledge images have been central to human civilization and to the mechanisms of human learning -- a fact underscored by dual-coding theory and the picture-superiority effect. Generating such images is challenging, demanding multimodal reasoning that fuses world knowledge with pixel-level grounding into clear explanatory visuals. To enable comprehensive evaluation, MMMG offers 4,456 expert-validated (knowledge) image-prompt pairs spanning 10 disciplines, 6 educational levels, and diverse knowledge formats such as charts, diagrams, and mind maps. To eliminate confounding complexity during evaluation, we adopt a unified Knowledge Graph (KG) representation. Each KG explicitly delineates a target image's core entities and their dependencies. We further introduce MMMG-Score to evaluate generated knowledge images. This metric combines factual fidelity, measured by graph-edit distance between KGs, with visual clarity assessment. Comprehensive evaluations of 16 state-of-the-art text-to-image generation models expose serious reasoning deficits -- low entity fidelity, weak relations, and clutter -- with GPT-4o achieving an MMMG-Score of only 50.20, underscoring the benchmark's difficulty. To spur further progress, we release FLUX-Reason (MMMG-Score of 34.45), an effective and open baseline that combines a reasoning LLM with diffusion models and is trained on 16,000 curated knowledge image-prompt pairs.

  • 9 authors
·
Jun 12, 2025 1

A Drop of Ink Makes a Million Think: The Spread of False Information in Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have gained increasing prominence in artificial intelligence, making a profound impact on society and various industries like business and science. However, the presence of false information on the internet and in text corpus poses a significant risk to the reliability and safety of LLMs, underscoring the urgent need to understand the mechanisms of how false information influences the behaviors of LLMs. In this paper, we dive into this problem and investigate how false information spreads in LLMs and affects related responses. Specifically, in our series of experiments, we investigate different factors that can influence the spread of information in LLMs by comparing three degrees of information relevance (direct, indirect, and peripheral), four information source styles (Twitter, web blogs, news reports, and research papers) and two common knowledge injection paradigms (in-context injection and learning-based injection). The experimental results show that (1)False information will spread and contaminate related memories in LLMs via a semantic diffusion process, i.e., false information has global detrimental effects beyond its direct impact. (2)Current LLMs are susceptible to authority bias, i.e., LLMs are more likely to follow false information presented in trustworthy styles such as news reports and research papers, which usually cause deeper and wider pollution of information. (3)Current LLMs are more sensitive to false information through in-context injection than through learning-based injection, which severely challenges the reliability and safety of LLMs even when all training data are trusty and correct. The above findings raise the need for new false information defense algorithms to address the global impact of false information, and new alignment algorithms to unbiasedly lead LLMs to follow essential human values rather than superficial patterns.

  • 7 authors
·
May 8, 2023

Search Beyond What Can Be Taught: Evolving the Knowledge Boundary in Agentic Visual Generation

Visual generators excel at rendering, but they confidently fabricate what they do not know. User requests are unbounded, evolving, and deeply long-tailed: new characters, trending entities, post-cutoff events, and more. This world-knowledge bottleneck is structural: generators are trained on fixed corpora, but the visual world is open-ended. We construct SearchGen-20K and SearchGen-Bench, with 20,839 prompts spanning twelve failure categories and twenty-two domains, paired with a pre-executed multimodal SearchGen-Corpus-1M to support offline, reproducible research. On SearchGen-Bench, frontier open generators score only 21 to 28 out of 100, a 40-point collapse invisible to existing benchmarks. The natural remedy is to employ search tools, enabling agentic visual generation. However, we find that naive search fails: it retrieves indiscriminately, injecting noise into prompts the generator already handles. We trace the root cause to a generator-specific, evolving knowledge boundary: the divide between what a generator can internalize through training and what must remain in external context. Although this boundary is hard to specify in advance, we show that it is discoverable through a teach-then-search co-training framework. Even a minimal version of this co-training recipe produces monotonic improvement, laying the foundation for recursive self-improvement in visual generation that can meet world-knowledge-grounded requests. We release the full dataset, co-training corpus, and search corpus as a replayable harness for tool-augmented, world-knowledge-grounded visual generation.

TIGER-Lab TIGER-Lab
·
Jul 8 4

A Survey on Knowledge Distillation of Large Language Models

This survey presents an in-depth exploration of knowledge distillation (KD) techniques within the realm of Large Language Models (LLMs), spotlighting the pivotal role of KD in transferring sophisticated capabilities from proprietary giants such as GPT-4 to accessible, open-source models like LLaMA and Mistral. Amidst the evolving AI landscape, this work elucidates the critical disparities between proprietary and open-source LLMs, demonstrating how KD serves as an essential conduit for imbuing the latter with the former's advanced functionalities and nuanced understandings. Our survey is meticulously structured around three foundational pillars: algorithm, skill, and verticalization -- providing a comprehensive examination of KD mechanisms, the enhancement of specific cognitive abilities, and their practical implications across diverse fields. Crucially, the survey navigates the intricate interplay between data augmentation (DA) and KD, illustrating how DA emerges as a powerful paradigm within the KD framework to bolster LLMs' performance. By leveraging DA to generate context-rich, skill-specific training data, KD transcends traditional boundaries, enabling open-source models to approximate the contextual adeptness, ethical alignment, and deep semantic insights characteristic of their proprietary counterparts. This work aims to provide an insightful guide for researchers and practitioners, offering a detailed overview of current methodologies in knowledge distillation and proposing future research directions. By bridging the gap between proprietary and open-source LLMs, this survey underscores the potential for more accessible, efficient, and sustainable AI solutions, fostering a more inclusive and equitable landscape in AI advancements. An associated Github repository is available at https://github.com/Tebmer/Awesome-Knowledge-Distillation-of-LLMs.

  • 9 authors
·
Feb 20, 2024

NeuroGenPoisoning: Neuron-Guided Attacks on Retrieval-Augmented Generation of LLM via Genetic Optimization of External Knowledge

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) empowers Large Language Models (LLMs) to dynamically integrate external knowledge during inference, improving their factual accuracy and adaptability. However, adversaries can inject poisoned external knowledge to override the model's internal memory. While existing attacks iteratively manipulate retrieval content or prompt structure of RAG, they largely ignore the model's internal representation dynamics and neuron-level sensitivities. The underlying mechanism of RAG poisoning has not been fully studied and the effect of knowledge conflict with strong parametric knowledge in RAG is not considered. In this work, we propose NeuroGenPoisoning, a novel attack framework that generates adversarial external knowledge in RAG guided by LLM internal neuron attribution and genetic optimization. Our method first identifies a set of Poison-Responsive Neurons whose activation strongly correlates with contextual poisoning knowledge. We then employ a genetic algorithm to evolve adversarial passages that maximally activate these neurons. Crucially, our framework enables massive-scale generation of effective poisoned RAG knowledge by identifying and reusing promising but initially unsuccessful external knowledge variants via observed attribution signals. At the same time, Poison-Responsive Neurons guided poisoning can effectively resolves knowledge conflict. Experimental results across models and datasets demonstrate consistently achieving high Population Overwrite Success Rate (POSR) of over 90% while preserving fluency. Empirical evidence shows that our method effectively resolves knowledge conflict.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 10

On Teacher Hacking in Language Model Distillation

Post-training of language models (LMs) increasingly relies on the following two stages: (i) knowledge distillation, where the LM is trained to imitate a larger teacher LM, and (ii) reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), where the LM is aligned by optimizing a reward model. In the second RLHF stage, a well-known challenge is reward hacking, where the LM over-optimizes the reward model. Such phenomenon is in line with Goodhart's law and can lead to degraded performance on the true objective. In this paper, we investigate whether a similar phenomenon, that we call teacher hacking, can occur during knowledge distillation. This could arise because the teacher LM is itself an imperfect approximation of the true distribution. To study this, we propose a controlled experimental setup involving: (i) an oracle LM representing the ground-truth distribution, (ii) a teacher LM distilled from the oracle, and (iii) a student LM distilled from the teacher. Our experiments reveal the following insights. When using a fixed offline dataset for distillation, teacher hacking occurs; moreover, we can detect it by observing when the optimization process deviates from polynomial convergence laws. In contrast, employing online data generation techniques effectively mitigates teacher hacking. More precisely, we identify data diversity as the key factor in preventing hacking. Overall, our findings provide a deeper understanding of the benefits and limitations of distillation for building robust and efficient LMs.

  • 7 authors
·
Feb 4, 2025 2

Knowledge is Not Enough: Injecting RL Skills for Continual Adaptation

Large Language Models (LLMs) face the "knowledge cutoff" challenge, where their frozen parametric memory prevents direct internalization of new information. While Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is commonly used to update model knowledge, it often updates factual content without reliably improving the model's ability to use the newly incorporated information for question answering or decision-making. Reinforcement Learning (RL) is essential for acquiring reasoning skills; however, its high computational cost makes it impractical for efficient online adaptation. We empirically observe that the parameter updates induced by SFT and RL are nearly orthogonal. Based on this observation, we propose Parametric Skill Transfer (PaST), a framework that supports modular skill transfer for efficient and effective knowledge adaptation. By extracting a domain-agnostic Skill Vector from a source domain, we can linearly inject knowledge manipulation skills into a target model after it has undergone lightweight SFT on new data. Experiments on knowledge-incorporation QA (SQuAD, LooGLE) and agentic tool-use benchmarks (ToolBench) demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. On SQuAD, PaST outperforms the state-of-the-art self-editing SFT baseline by up to 9.9 points. PaST further scales to long-context QA on LooGLE with an 8.0-point absolute accuracy gain, and improves zero-shot ToolBench success rates by +10.3 points on average with consistent gains across tool categories, indicating strong scalability and cross-domain transferability of the Skill Vector.

Benchmarking Knowledge-driven Zero-shot Learning

External knowledge (a.k.a. side information) plays a critical role in zero-shot learning (ZSL) which aims to predict with unseen classes that have never appeared in training data. Several kinds of external knowledge, such as text and attribute, have been widely investigated, but they alone are limited with incomplete semantics. Some very recent studies thus propose to use Knowledge Graph (KG) due to its high expressivity and compatibility for representing kinds of knowledge. However, the ZSL community is still in short of standard benchmarks for studying and comparing different external knowledge settings and different KG-based ZSL methods. In this paper, we proposed six resources covering three tasks, i.e., zero-shot image classification (ZS-IMGC), zero-shot relation extraction (ZS-RE), and zero-shot KG completion (ZS-KGC). Each resource has a normal ZSL benchmark and a KG containing semantics ranging from text to attribute, from relational knowledge to logical expressions. We have clearly presented these resources including their construction, statistics, data formats and usage cases w.r.t. different ZSL methods. More importantly, we have conducted a comprehensive benchmarking study, with two general and state-of-the-art methods, two setting-specific methods and one interpretable method. We discussed and compared different ZSL paradigms w.r.t. different external knowledge settings, and found that our resources have great potential for developing more advanced ZSL methods and more solutions for applying KGs for augmenting machine learning. All the resources are available at https://github.com/China-UK-ZSL/Resources_for_KZSL.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 28, 2021

WebEvolver: Enhancing Web Agent Self-Improvement with Coevolving World Model

Agent self-improvement, where the backbone Large Language Model (LLM) of the agent are trained on trajectories sampled autonomously based on their own policies, has emerged as a promising approach for enhancing performance. Recent advancements, particularly in web environments, face a critical limitation: their performance will reach a stagnation point during autonomous learning cycles, hindering further improvement. We argue that this stems from limited exploration of the web environment and insufficient exploitation of pre-trained web knowledge in LLMs. To improve the performance of self-improvement, we propose a novel framework that introduces a co-evolving World Model LLM. This world model predicts the next observation based on the current observation and action within the web environment. Leveraging LLMs' pretrained knowledge of abundant web content, the World Model serves dual roles: (1) as a virtual web server generating self-instructed training data to continuously refine the agent's policy, and (2) as an imagination engine during inference, enabling look-ahead simulation to guide action selection for the agent LLM. Experiments in real-world web environments (Mind2Web-Live, WebVoyager, and GAIA-web) show a 10% performance gain over existing self-evolving agents, demonstrating the efficacy and generalizability of our approach, without using any distillation from more powerful close-sourced models. Our work establishes the necessity of integrating world models into autonomous agent frameworks to unlock sustained adaptability.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 22, 2025