paper-with-me

Papers

Evaluating Contextually Mediated Factual Recall in Multilingual Large Language Models

2026-01-18 · Yihong Liu, Bingyu Xiong, Hinrich Schütze arxiv

Large language models (LLMs) can recall a wide range of factual knowledge across languages. However, existing factual recall evaluations primarily assess fact retrieval in isolation, where the queried entity is explicitly named and the fact is requested directly. In natural language use, facts are often accessed through context, where the relevant entity is introduced only indirectly. In this work, we study contextually mediated factual recall, asking whether LLMs can reliably retrieve factual knowledge when the target entity is embedded in a naturalistic context rather than queried explicitly, across languages. We construct controlled prompts that preserve the underlying fact while introducing referential mediation through contextual sentences. To disentangle contextual effects from name-specific associations, we further compare performance using synthetic names and real names across languages. Evaluating multiple model families in five languages, we find that contextual mediation consistently degrades factual recall, with substantial variation across relations. Larger models are more robust to contextual mediation, exhibiting a reduced performance gap relative to direct queries, while the effect of real names and name origin is mixed and unsystematic. These findings highlight a gap between isolated factual recall and context-dependent language understanding in multilingual LLMs.

📄 PDF Abstract BibTeX arXiv:2601.12555

Code (0)

등록된 구현이 없습니다.

Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반

How Do Multilingual Models Remember? Investigating Multilingual Factual Recall Mechanisms

2024-10-18 · Constanza Fierro, Negar Foroutan, Desmond Elliott, Anders Søgaard

Large Language Models (LLMs) store and retrieve vast amounts of factual knowledge acquired during pre-training. Prior research has localized and identified mechanisms behind knowledge recall; however, it has primarily fo…

Tracing Multilingual Factual Knowledge Acquisition in Pretraining

2025-05-20 · Yihong Liu, Mingyang Wang, Amir Hossein Kargaran, Felicia Körner 외

Large Language Models (LLMs) are capable of recalling multilingual factual knowledge present in their pretraining data. However, most studies evaluate only the final model, leaving the development of factual recall and c…

Multi-FAct: Assessing Factuality of Multilingual LLMs using FActScore

2024-02-28 · Sheikh Shafayat, Eunsu Kim, Juhyun Oh, Alice Oh

Evaluating the factuality of long-form large language model (LLM)-generated text is an important challenge. Recently there has been a surge of interest in factuality evaluation for English, but little is known about the …

DiversityFormHallucinationLanguage Modeling+3

Polyglot or Not? Measuring Multilingual Encyclopedic Knowledge in Foundation Models

2023-05-23 · Tim Schott, Daniel Furman, Shreshta Bhat

In this work, we assess the ability of foundation models to recall encyclopedic knowledge across a wide range of linguistic contexts. To support this, we: 1) produce a 20-language dataset that contains 303k factual assoc…

counterfactualRetrieval

Language Models' Factuality Depends on the Language of Inquiry

2025-02-25 · Tushar Aggarwal, Kumar Tanmay, Ayush Agrawal, Kumar Ayush 외

Multilingual language models (LMs) are expected to recall factual knowledge consistently across languages, yet they often fail to transfer knowledge between languages even when they possess the correct information in one…

Transfer Learning