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Probing for Knowledge Attribution in Large Language Models

arxiv.org/abs/2602.22787

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Updated 5 h ago · first seen 11 Sept 2026

paper_01M294G5P6WXM39MEKMAW71CJC

Published
11 Sept 2026
T1 · 5 h ago
arXiv
2602.22787
T1 · 5 h ago
Category
cs.CL
T1 · 5 h ago

Abstract

Large language model (LLM) hallucinations, meaning fluent but factually incorrect generations, fall into two types: faithfulness violations, where the model misuses provided context, and factuality violations, where answers reflect errors in internal knowledge. Proper mitigation depends on knowing which source drives each answer. We study contributive attribution, i.e. the classification of the dominant knowledge source behind each output, and show that a simple linear probe trained on hidden representations can reliably identify it. We introduce AttriWiki, a self-supervised pipeline that automatically generates labelled training data by prompting models to recall withheld entities from memory or read them from context without relying on knowledge conflicts. Probes trained on AttriWiki achieve up to 0.96 Macro-$F_1$ on Llama-3.1-8B, Mistral-7B, and Qwen-7B, transfer to SQuAD and WebQuestions with 0.94-0.99 Macro-$F_1$, and generalise zero-shot to Tighidet et al. (2024)'s benchmark, outperforming their probe on conflicting settings without retraining. Furthermore, attribution mismatches raise error rates by up to 70%, though correct attribution does not guarantee correct answers, pointing to the need for broader detection frameworks.

Authors 3

Ivo Brink, Alexander Boer, Dennis Ulmer

Specification

Official page

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 5 h agohigh

Arxiv announce type
replace

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 5 h agohigh

arXiv id
2602.22787

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 5 h agohigh

Categories
cs.CL, cs.AI

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 5 h agohigh

PDF

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 5 h agohigh

Primary category
cs.CL

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 5 h agohigh

Published
11 Sept 2026

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 5 h agohigh

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Provenance

Attributed facts

9

Source tiers

T19

Freshest observation

5 h ago

Conflicts

None