@inproceedings{choi-etal-2025-conflict,
title = "Conflict-Aware Soft Prompting for Retrieval-Augmented Generation",
author = "Choi, Eunseong and
Park, June and
Lee, Hyeri and
Lee, Jongwuk",
editor = "Christodoulopoulos, Christos and
Chakraborty, Tanmoy and
Rose, Carolyn and
Peng, Violet",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
month = nov,
year = "2025",
address = "Suzhou, China",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-main.1371/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.emnlp-main.1371",
pages = "26981--26995",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-332-6",
abstract = "Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhances the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by incorporating external knowledge into their input prompts. However, when the retrieved context contradicts the LLM{'}s parametric knowledge, it often fails to resolve the conflict between incorrect external context and correct parametric knowledge, known as context-memory conflict. To tackle this problem, we introduce Conflict-Aware REtrieval-Augmented Generation (CARE), consisting of a context assessor and a base LLM. The context assessor encodes external context into compact memory embeddings. Through grounded/adversarial soft prompting, the context assessor is trained to discern unreliable context and capture a guidance signal that directs reasoning toward the more reliable knowledge source. Extensive experiments show that CARE effectively mitigates context-memory conflicts, leading to an average performance gain of 5.0{\%} on QA and fact-checking benchmarks, establishing a promising direction for trustworthy and adaptive RAG systems."
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<abstract>Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhances the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by incorporating external knowledge into their input prompts. However, when the retrieved context contradicts the LLM’s parametric knowledge, it often fails to resolve the conflict between incorrect external context and correct parametric knowledge, known as context-memory conflict. To tackle this problem, we introduce Conflict-Aware REtrieval-Augmented Generation (CARE), consisting of a context assessor and a base LLM. The context assessor encodes external context into compact memory embeddings. Through grounded/adversarial soft prompting, the context assessor is trained to discern unreliable context and capture a guidance signal that directs reasoning toward the more reliable knowledge source. Extensive experiments show that CARE effectively mitigates context-memory conflicts, leading to an average performance gain of 5.0% on QA and fact-checking benchmarks, establishing a promising direction for trustworthy and adaptive RAG systems.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Conflict-Aware Soft Prompting for Retrieval-Augmented Generation
%A Choi, Eunseong
%A Park, June
%A Lee, Hyeri
%A Lee, Jongwuk
%Y Christodoulopoulos, Christos
%Y Chakraborty, Tanmoy
%Y Rose, Carolyn
%Y Peng, Violet
%S Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
%D 2025
%8 November
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Suzhou, China
%@ 979-8-89176-332-6
%F choi-etal-2025-conflict
%X Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhances the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by incorporating external knowledge into their input prompts. However, when the retrieved context contradicts the LLM’s parametric knowledge, it often fails to resolve the conflict between incorrect external context and correct parametric knowledge, known as context-memory conflict. To tackle this problem, we introduce Conflict-Aware REtrieval-Augmented Generation (CARE), consisting of a context assessor and a base LLM. The context assessor encodes external context into compact memory embeddings. Through grounded/adversarial soft prompting, the context assessor is trained to discern unreliable context and capture a guidance signal that directs reasoning toward the more reliable knowledge source. Extensive experiments show that CARE effectively mitigates context-memory conflicts, leading to an average performance gain of 5.0% on QA and fact-checking benchmarks, establishing a promising direction for trustworthy and adaptive RAG systems.
%R 10.18653/v1/2025.emnlp-main.1371
%U https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-main.1371/
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.emnlp-main.1371
%P 26981-26995
Markdown (Informal)
[Conflict-Aware Soft Prompting for Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-main.1371/) (Choi et al., EMNLP 2025)
ACL