通过匿名化实体训练,让大模型更依赖外部证据而非记忆知识。
Knowledgeless Language Models: Suppressing Parametric Recall for Evidence-Grounded Language Modeling

- 用匿名文本预训练,切断模型对实体知识的依赖。
- 在有上下文时表现更好,错误率降低20%-25%。
- 适合需要可靠推理和防幻觉的应用场景。
语言模型将大量事实知识编码在参数中,当这些知识过时、不全或与上下文不符时,会导致不可靠行为。本文研究是否可通过修改预训练信号,引导模型从依赖参数记忆转向基于证据推理。提出知识无感语言模型(KLLMs),在命名实体被匿名化的语料上预训练,从而移除关键的事实监督通道。该方法显著降低闭卷事实召回率,同时在提供上下文的任务中表现提升。跨多个模型规模,KLLMs在上下文问答、事实验证和幻觉检测任务中均优于基线模型。尤其在检索结果不完美的情况下,相对标准模型性能提升20%-25%,且校准性更好(ECE、Brier分数、AUROC改善),拒绝回答更可靠。结果表明,预训练阶段抑制实体关联监督可促使模型认知模式转变:更少依赖参数知识,更多依赖外部证据,提升真实场景下的可靠性。这表明预训练期的知识控制可作为检索增强与工具系统的重要补充。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Language models encode substantial factual knowledge in their parameters, which can lead to unreliable behavior when this knowledge is outdated, incomplete, or misaligned with the provided context. In this work, we study whether modifying the pretraining signal can systematically shift models away from parametric recall and toward evidence-grounded reasoning. We introduce Knowledge--''Less'' Language Models (KLLMs), a fundamentally different epistemic training paradigm for LLMs, which are pretrained on corpora in which named entities are anonymized, thereby removing a primary channel for entity-linked factual supervision. This intervention substantially reduces closed-book factual recall, while often improving performance on tasks where relevant information is provided as context. Across multiple model scales, KLLMs consistently outperform matched baselines on contextual question answering, fact verification, and hallucination detection benchmarks. Crucially, in retrieval-grounded settings with imperfect evidence, KLLMs show improved robustness and achieve up to 20--25\% relative gains over standard language models. They further exhibit better calibration, with improved ECE, Brier score, and AUROC, as well as more reliable abstention behavior. Our results demonstrate that suppressing entity-linked supervision during pretraining induces a shift in epistemic behavior: KLLMs rely less on parametric knowledge and more on external evidence, leading to improved reliability under realistic conditions. This suggests that pretraining-time control over knowledge acquisition can complement retrieval-augmented and tool-based systems by providing a more evidence-sensitive base model.
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