Bridging External and Parametric Knowledge: Mitigating Hallucination of LLMs with Shared-Private Semantic Synergy in Dual-Stream Knowledge

Yi Sui, Chaozhuo Li, Chen Zhang, Dawei Song, Qiuchi Li


Abstract
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) aims to mitigate the hallucination of Large Language Models (LLMs) by retrieving and incorporating relevant external knowledge into the generation process. However, the external knowledge may contain noise and conflict with the parametric knowledge of LLMs, leading to degraded performance. Current LLMs lack inherent mechanisms for resolving such conflicts. To fill this gap, we propose a Dual-Stream Knowledge-Augmented Framework for Shared-Private Semantic Synergy (DSSP-RAG). Central to it is the refinement of the traditional self-attention into a mixed-attention that distinguishes shared and private semantics for a controlled knowledge integration. An unsupervised hallucination detection method that captures the LLMs’ intrinsic cognitive uncertainty ensures that external knowledge is introduced only when necessary. To reduce noise in external knowledge, an Energy Quotient (EQ), defined by attention difference matrices between task-aligned and task-misaligned layers, is proposed. Extensive experiments show that DSSP-RAG achieves a superior performance over strong baselines.
Anthology ID:
2025.emnlp-main.549
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
EMNLP
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
10845–10869
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.549/
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Cite (ACL):
Yi Sui, Chaozhuo Li, Chen Zhang, Dawei Song, and Qiuchi Li. 2025. Bridging External and Parametric Knowledge: Mitigating Hallucination of LLMs with Shared-Private Semantic Synergy in Dual-Stream Knowledge. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 10845–10869, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Bridging External and Parametric Knowledge: Mitigating Hallucination of LLMs with Shared-Private Semantic Synergy in Dual-Stream Knowledge (Sui et al., EMNLP 2025)
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