Papers › Investigating the Factual Knowledge Boundary of Large Language Models with Retrieval...
Investigating the Factual Knowledge Boundary of Large Language Models with Retrieval Augmentation
Ruiyang Ren, Yuhao Wang, Yingqi Qu, Wayne Xin Zhao, Jing Liu, Hao Tian, Hua Wu, Ji-Rong Wen, Haifeng Wang
Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive prowess in solving a wide range of tasks with world knowledge. However, it remains unclear how well LLMs are able to perceive their factual knowledge boundaries, particularly under retrieval augmentation settings. In this study, we present the first analysis on the factual knowledge boundaries of LLMs and how retrieval augmentation affects LLMs on open-domain question answering (QA), with a bunch of important findings. Specifically, we focus on three research questions and analyze them by examining QA, priori judgement and posteriori judgement capabilities of LLMs. We show evidence that LLMs possess unwavering confidence in their knowledge and cannot handle the conflict between internal and external knowledge well. Furthermore, retrieval augmentation proves to be an effective approach in enhancing LLMs' awareness of knowledge boundaries. We further conduct thorough experiments to examine how different factors affect LLMs and propose a simple method to dynamically utilize supporting documents with our judgement strategy. Additionally, we find that the relevance between the supporting documents and the questions significantly impacts LLMs' QA and judgemental capabilities. The code to reproduce this work is available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/LLM-Knowledge-Boundary.
In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.
For agents, Syntology's MCP tool lists every function and class Syntology harvested from this paper and whether it ran (how to connect): get_harvested_code_for_paper(arxiv_id="2307.11019")
Code
Syntology Ran 3 of 3 code samples harvested from 1 repository linked to this paper; 0 have no recorded run. Of those that ran: 1 ran · honoured contract; 2 ran · our draft was wrong.
By repository: official repository: 3 samples from 1 repository, 3 ran. The run record, sample by sample. “Ran” means executed on a synthesized input, not that the code is correct or reproduces the paper.
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
3 samples harvested; 3 ran; 1 honoured the contract we drafted; 0 have no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-24; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.
Licence: 3 of the 3 samples are pointer only, meaning Syntology does not serve that copy's text. This page shows no code text for any sample; each one links to its file in the repository.
Harvested from rucaibox/llm-knowledge-boundary. “Ran” means the sample executed on a synthesized input. It does not mean the output is correct, and nothing here reproduces the paper's results. “Honoured” and “violated” refer to a contract Syntology drafted from the code itself; “our draft was wrong” and “fixture could not drive it” are failures of Syntology's instrument, not of the code.
Each sample ends with its code_sha256, Syntology's identity for that exact code. An agent fetches the stored sample with Syntology's MCP tool get_code(code_sha256="…") (how to connect); click an identity to copy that call.
Repository labels, per sample. official repository: The archive marks this repository official for the paper. named in the paper: The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official. community (archive-listed): In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper. found in paper text by Syntology: Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted. community: Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested. Samples from a repository marked official are listed first. Licence labels name the repository's licence as recorded at harvest. “Pointer only” means Syntology does not serve that copy's text, for one of four reasons: no licence file was found; the licence was not identified; the licence is recorded as permissive but that copy's record is not marked cleared; or the licence is outside the permissive list Syntology serves text under (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD and similar). Some licences outside that list permit redistribution, such as WTFPL, and GPL-3.0 under its conditions; they are simply not on the list. Hover a licence label for the reason. File links open the file on GitHub at the default branch, which may have changed since the harvest.
8add15df29fd69ae · report
d600f153019ef48d · report
6866c65c598f18ab · report
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Methods
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections