让大模型学会判断自己该信谁,或干脆不答。
Trust or Abstain? A Self-Aware RAG Approach

- 用多路径推理提取模型对参数知识和外部知识的信念
- 在冲突数据集上提升准确率与可信度,最高增益18.7%
- 无需微调,适合需要高可靠性问答的场景
检索增强生成(RAG)通过引入外部证据提升大语言模型性能,但当外部上下文知识(CK)与模型参数知识(PK)冲突或均不可靠时,会引发知识矛盾。现有方法仅决定使用哪个来源,未评估答案路径是否正确。本文提出自知型信念估计器SABER,无需微调,结合自我先验与多路径推理中的条件表示,通过两个轻量级预测器估算可靠性信念,实现对信任PK、信任CK、信任任一或放弃回答的四类决策。在四个大模型上测试,覆盖约69,000个查询-上下文实例,来自五个冲突问答数据集。SABER在端到端准确率与冲突场景下的忠实性上优于十种推理与微调基线,尤其在高冲突数据集上表现更优。放弃回答时,其风险-覆盖率曲线帕累托占优所有基于提示的放弃策略,可调节覆盖率与风险平衡。代码已开源。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) improves large language models (LLMs) by incorporating external evidence, but it also introduces knowledge conflicts when retrieved contextual knowledge (CK) and parametric knowledge (PK) disagree or are both unreliable. Existing approaches mainly coordinate which source to use, without explicitly asking whether each answer path is correct. We argue that faithful RAG requires LLM self-awareness, namely the ability to recognize the limits of its own knowledge and reasoning. To ground this problem, we construct a model-specific, ground-truth-aligned knowledge-conflict benchmark by evaluating LLM backbones on PK-only and CK-conditioned answer paths over approximately 69K query-context instances per backbone, drawn from five conflict-QA datasets. We then introduce SABER, a Self-Aware Belief Estimator for RAG that requires no LLM fine-tuning. SABER combines a self-prior with PK-side and CK-side conditional reasoning representations from multi-trace inference, then estimates reliability beliefs with two lightweight predictors to drive a 4-cell decision over trust PK, trust CK, trust either, or abstain. Across four LLM backbones, SABER improves end-to-end accuracy and conflict-specific faithfulness over ten inference-time and fine-tuning baselines, with the largest gains on conflict-heavy datasets. Under abstention, SABER's risk-coverage curve Pareto-dominates every prompt-based abstainer, providing a tunable balance between coverage and answer risk. Our code is available at https://github.com/xizhu1022/SABER.
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