Understanding Parametric and Contextual Knowledge Reconciliation within Large Language Models

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) provides additional contextual knowledge to complement the parametric knowledge in Large Language Models (LLMs). These two knowledge interweave to enhance the accuracy and timeliness of LLM responses. However, the internal mechanisms by which LLMs utilize these knowledge remain unclear. We propose modeling the forward propagation of knowledge as an entity flow , employing this framework to trace LLMs’ internal behaviors when processing mixed-source knowledge. Linear probing utilizes a trainable linear classifier to detect specific attributes in hidden layers. However, once trained, a probe cannot adapt to dynamically specified entities. To address this challenge, we construct an entity-aware probe, which introduces special tokens to mark probing targets and employs a small trainable rank-8 lora update to process these special markers. We first verify this approach through an attribution experiment, demonstrating that it can accurately detect information about ad-hoc entities from complex hidden states. Next, we trace entity flows across layers to understand how LLMs reconcile conflicting knowledge internally. Our probing results reveal that contextual and parametric knowledge are routed between tokens through distinct sets of attention heads, supporting attention competition only within knowledge types. While conflicting knowledge maintains a residual presence across layers, aligned knowledge from multiple sources gradually accumulates, with the magnitude of this accumulation directly determining its influence on final outputs.