Entity-Based Knowledge Conflicts in Question Answering

Understand

Knowledge-dependent tasks typically use two sources of knowledge: parametric, learned at training time, and contextual, given as a passage at inference time.

• To understand how models use these sources together, we formalize the problem of knowledge conflicts, where the contextual information contradicts the learned information.
• Analyzing the behaviour of popular models, we measure their over-reliance on memorized information (the cause of hallucinations), and uncover important factors that exacerbate this behaviour.
• Lastly, we propose a simple method to mitigate over-reliance on parametric knowledge, which minimizes hallucination, and improves out-of-distribution generalization by 4%-7%.