Blind Men and the Elephant: Probing the Epistemic Myopia of LLMs under Long-Tail Divergent Knowledge
2mo
- Published
- Collected
Factual question answering (QA) typically assumes a single canonical answer, obscuring whether large language models (LLMs) retain divergent accounts of long-tail facts. To address this gap, we introduce ElephantBench, a closed-book knowledge probe comprising 1,094 questions generated through an auditable graph-based pipeline. The pipeline retrieves related documents from a low-exposure web corpus, identifies naturally occurring disagreements, and converts them into multi-account QA records. Each answer is verified against the originating documents and authoritative public web sources and is then reviewed by human annotators. Across 32 models, even the strongest model recovers both accounts on only 52.4% of questions, while on nearly all remaining questions it recalls one account but omits the other. Scaling model size and inference-time reasoning improve recall but do not eliminate this incompleteness. Corpus analysis further shows that exposure imbalance favors the dominant account, whereas greater minority-side exposure is associated with more complete recall. These findings establish ElephantBench as a reproducible knowledge probe for diagnosing epistemic myopia in parametric memory. More broadly, our graph-based benchmark construction pipeline provides an efficient and scalable way to turn long-tail corpora into source-traceable knowledge probes, supporting efforts to evaluate and advance the epistemic rigour of next-generation LLMs. Code is available at https://github.com/Tencent/ElephantBench.
Authors
Zhuoshi Pan, Junru Lu, Yan Qian, H. Vicky Zhao, Di Yin, Xing Sun
Categories
overfeed.news indexes and links. We publish a short excerpt — the full article stays at arXiv AI Papers.
More from arXiv AI Papers
Log in to follow this source
Learning a calibrated decision head from logged bandit feedback
A decision head reads a state and a list of options and returns a probability per option in one forward pass. Once deployed, it usually observes only whether the option it chose was right: logged bandit feedback. We adapt such a head, LoRA on Qwen3-0.6B-Base and 1.7B-Base, from that feedback and report three results. First, the Brier or log score of the sampled action's own probability is not a usable REINFORCE reward: every wrong action earns at least gold's reward, with a mean baseline the lowest-probability wrong action gets the largest advantage, and at two options the signal is zero; in one run it cut accuracy on ordered-scale questions from .636 to .111. Scoring the probability as a loss by the pathwise gradient avoids the collapse, as do the REINFORCE rewards r and r minus p. Second, with full labels, none of four tested bandit arms beat cross-entropy plus one temperature on mean expected calibration error (ECE) over four unseen label schemas. Third, from logged feedback alone, Chosen-Action Proper Scoring (CAPS), the direct method with a proper score on the chosen action's probability, beats fine-tuning on confirmed answers only, which discards negatives: on Banking77 by 2.6 accuracy points, .053 lower ECE and lower selective risk (three seeds against one baseline seed), and by 21.7 points on one seed on emotion data with an often-wrong logger. At N 5000, CAPS stays 1.5 points below full-label training at 0.6B and .6 points at 1.7B against one full-label seed, and propensity weights add nothing on this log. Under feedback flipped at a known rate, one seed per rate, CAPS's confidence tracks the noisy channel on average, backward correction recovers most of the clean calibration, and early stopping on held-out logged outcomes prevented memorising noisy draws in all three runs. Code, adapters, logs and per-record results are public.
TraceKV: Policy-Preserving Low-Rank KV Cache Compression for Reasoning Vision-Language Models
Reasoning vision-language models (VLMs) impose substantial KV cache demands from both large multimodal contexts and growing reasoning traces. Low-rank KV compression has emerged as a promising paradigm that stores low-dimensional latents of KV states and can be combined with quantization. However, existing low-rank methods often induce growing predictive policy drift from the dense model when compressing reasoning KV states, resulting in reasoning failures. We identify two key causes of this degradation: calibration-state mismatch between static contexts and on-policy reasoning states, and unequal error sensitivity across KV states. To address these challenges, we propose TraceKV, a training-free low-rank KV compression framework that unifies on-policy calibration, sensitivity-aware SVD, and global rank allocation under a single policy-preserving principle, substantially reducing policy-KL divergence during reasoning. Experiments across multiple VLMs and visual reasoning benchmarks demonstrate superior accuracy--memory trade-offs, achieving near-lossless reasoning accuracy with 5.64KV cache compression when combined with quantization. Optimized low-rank attention kernels further deliver up to 1.83end-to-end decoding speedup. Code will be available at https://github.com/AK-DREAM/TraceKV.
Can We Make an LLM Dumber, or Is It Just Playing Dumb? An Empirical Study of Believable Performance Throttling
A benchmark score is commonly read as a proxy for model capability. We study the inverse problem: can a model be driven to a target score, and do its failures resemble those of a naturally weaker model? We operationalize believable performance reduction along three axes: target calibration, item-difficulty structure, and error-distribution similarity to a real weak reference. We introduce CapLadder, an IRT-calibrated suite of 1,985 items spanning mathematics, code, multiple-choice reasoning, and tool use. A simple weak-teacher LoRA dial reaches unseen target levels on reasoning with a 1.9-point held-out calibration error, whereas prompting, temperature, and weight noise cannot combine comparable range and precision. Yet on multiple choice, the dial converges to an answer-token attractor: up to 97% of its newly introduced errors land on one letter, with the attractor changing from D in Qwen to A in Llama. Logit interventions identify a dominant near-constant shift: subtracting the estimated shift on held-out items recovers 52 to 59% of lost accuracy and removes the dominant attractor, while option permutation confirms that the bias tracks token position rather than option content. With high inter-annotator agreement (κ=0.94), human-coded error-category distributions nonetheless match the weak reference on reasoning (JS = 0.00), showing that local plausibility and aggregate detectability differ. Structured tool calls exhibit more natural degradation in the Qwen family (JS = 0.09), while a globally calibrated dial transfers poorly across benchmarks (14.2-point error on two usable benchmarks). Precise score control, therefore, does not imply a portable or believable reduction in skill.
Observations Drift, Structures Remain: Structural Pretraining with Time Alignment for Electromagnetic Signals
Electromagnetic signal modeling is increasingly moving toward self-supervised pretraining on heterogeneous I/Q observations. However, an observed waveform is jointly shaped by signal generation, propagation environments, and acquisition processes, which mix reusable structural regularities with observation-specific variations. Existing methods usually pursue unified pretraining with reconstruction objectives on mixed observations. This heterogeneity creates two key mismatches for reconstruction pretraining: (1) appearance mismatch, induced by propagation-dependent waveform variations; and (2) temporal mismatch, induced by acquisition-dependent sampling coordinates. These mismatches make observation-specific appearances and sampling coordinates easier to reconstruct than stable signal structures, inducing observational shortcuts. We identify this failure mode as observation-biased pretraining. To address this, we propose Structural Pretraining with Time Alignment for heterogeneous EM signals. It mitigates temporal mismatch with RoPE-fs, which maps token positions to sampling-rate-normalized physical-time positions, and reduces reliance on appearance shortcuts by replacing waveform reconstruction with masked prediction of discrete structural units. These units are organized into atomic structural units and emergent structural units that capture variable-length compositional patterns beyond fixed patch boundaries. Across diverse EM benchmarks, our method improves both full-supervision and few-shot adaptation over existing EM pretraining baselines, showing that the learned representations better preserve structural consistency when observations drift in waveform appearance and temporal scale.