Select to Know: An Internal-External Knowledge Self-Selection Framework for Domain-Specific Question Answering

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: He, Bolei, He, Xinran, Shao, Run, Shu, Shanfu, Xue, Xianwei, Cheng, Mingquan, Li, Haifeng, Ling, Zhenhua
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author He, Bolei
He, Xinran
Shao, Run
Shu, Shanfu
Xue, Xianwei
Cheng, Mingquan
Li, Haifeng
Ling, Zhenhua
author_facet He, Bolei
He, Xinran
Shao, Run
Shu, Shanfu
Xue, Xianwei
Cheng, Mingquan
Li, Haifeng
Ling, Zhenhua
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) perform well in general QA but often struggle in domain-specific scenarios. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) introduces external knowledge but suffers from hallucinations and latency due to noisy retrievals. Continued pretraining internalizes domain knowledge but is costly and lacks cross-domain flexibility. We attribute this challenge to the long-tail distribution of domain knowledge, which leaves partial yet useful internal knowledge underutilized. We further argue that knowledge acquisition should be progressive, mirroring human learning: first understanding concepts, then applying them to complex reasoning. To address this, we propose Selct2Know (S2K), a cost-effective framework that internalizes domain knowledge through an internal-external knowledge self-selection strategy and selective supervised fine-tuning. We also introduce a structured reasoning data generation pipeline and integrate GRPO to enhance reasoning ability. Experiments on medical, legal, and financial QA benchmarks show that S2K consistently outperforms existing methods and matches domain-pretrained LLMs with significantly lower cost.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_15213
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Select to Know: An Internal-External Knowledge Self-Selection Framework for Domain-Specific Question Answering
He, Bolei
He, Xinran
Shao, Run
Shu, Shanfu
Xue, Xianwei
Cheng, Mingquan
Li, Haifeng
Ling, Zhenhua
Computation and Language
Large Language Models (LLMs) perform well in general QA but often struggle in domain-specific scenarios. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) introduces external knowledge but suffers from hallucinations and latency due to noisy retrievals. Continued pretraining internalizes domain knowledge but is costly and lacks cross-domain flexibility. We attribute this challenge to the long-tail distribution of domain knowledge, which leaves partial yet useful internal knowledge underutilized. We further argue that knowledge acquisition should be progressive, mirroring human learning: first understanding concepts, then applying them to complex reasoning. To address this, we propose Selct2Know (S2K), a cost-effective framework that internalizes domain knowledge through an internal-external knowledge self-selection strategy and selective supervised fine-tuning. We also introduce a structured reasoning data generation pipeline and integrate GRPO to enhance reasoning ability. Experiments on medical, legal, and financial QA benchmarks show that S2K consistently outperforms existing methods and matches domain-pretrained LLMs with significantly lower cost.
title Select to Know: An Internal-External Knowledge Self-Selection Framework for Domain-Specific Question Answering
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15213