As the real world continuously evolves, temporal facts change over time, requiring large language models to simultaneously rely on internal parametric knowledge and externally retrieved evidence for temporal reasoning. However, external knowledge may be inaccurate, while internal knowledge can become outdated. Temporal inconsistencies between these heterogeneous sources can accumulate during multi-step reasoning, leading to Time-Anchor Drift (TAD)—a phenomenon where an incorrect temporal reference is established early and subsequently propagated, ultimately causing reasoning failure. To address this issue, we propose M-TRACE, a multi-agent reasoning framework for temporal knowledge conflicts. M-TRACE explicitly maintains a State Timeline to perform step-wise temporal alignment and coexistence checks between internal states and external evidence. Detected conflicts are summarized into a structured Conflict Report, which guides conflict-aware final reasoning. We further introduce TimeConfQA, a temporal question answering benchmark with controlled temporal knowledge conflicts. Experimental results show that M-TRACE effectively reduces time-anchor drift and consistently improves performance on complex temporal question answering tasks, demonstrating the value of explicit conflict modeling for temporal reasoning. The code can be found at https://github.com/h-yii/M-TRACE.

Large Language Models have achieved impressive results in general reasoning tasks. However, they still face significant challenges when applied to temporal knowledge graph question answering (TKGQA), particularly exhibiting broken temporal reasoning chains and a lack of dynamic error-correction. These limitations hinder their capacity to handle complex temporal logic and make it difficult to recover once a reasoning error occurs. To address this issue, we propose Regret-Now, a novel LLM-based temporal reasoning framework inspired by the physical principle of minimum potential energy. Regret-Now models the reasoning process as a dynamic trajectory moving toward a more stable state, where each step is expected to a lower potential energy. We introduce the Regret Stage that evaluates the “potential energy” of each intermediate reasoning step and triggers real-time rollback if an abnormal rise in potential energy is detected—indicating a likely error. We evaluate Regret-Now on two standard TKGQA benchmarks: CronQuestions and MultiTQ. Experimental results show consistent gains over strong baselines, validating physics-inspired modeling for LLM-based TKGQA. The code can be found at https://github.com/h-yii/Regret-Now.