Shanfu Shu
2025
Select to Know: An Internal-External Knowledge Self-Selection Framework for Domain-Specific Question Answering
Bolei He
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Xinran He
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Run Shao
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Shanfu Shu
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Xianwei Xue
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MingQuan Cheng
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Haifeng Li
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Zhen-Hua Ling
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Large Language Models (LLMs) perform well in general QA but often struggle in domain-specific scenarios. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) introduces external knowledge but suffers from hallucinations and latency due to noisy retrievals. Continued pretraining internalizes domain knowledge but is costly and lacks cross-domain flexibility. We attribute this challenge to the long-tail distribution of domain knowledge, which leaves partial yet useful internal knowledge underutilized. We further argue that knowledge acquisition should be progressive, mirroring human learning: first understanding concepts, then applying them to complex reasoning. To address this, we propose Selct2Know (S2K), a cost-effective framework that internalizes domain knowledge through an internal-external knowledge self-selection strategy and selective supervised fine-tuning. We also introduce a structured reasoning data generation pipeline and integrate GRPO to enhance reasoning ability. Experiments on medical, legal, and financial QA benchmarks show that S2K consistently outperforms existing methods and matches domain-pretrained LLMs with significantly lower cost.
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- MingQuan Cheng 1
- Bolei He 1
- Xinran He 1
- Haifeng Li 1
- Zhen-Hua Ling 1
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