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| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2026
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.12075 |
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Table of Contents:
- Language models used in retrieval-augmented settings must arbitrate between parametric knowledge stored in their weights and contextual information in the prompt. This work presents a mechanistic study of that choice by extracting an \emph{arbitration vector} from model activations on a curated dataset designed to disentangle (i) irrelevant contexts that elicit parametric recall and (ii) relevant but false contexts that elicit copying. The vector is computed as the residual-stream centroid difference between these regimes across 27 relations, and is injected as an additive intervention at selected layers and token spans to steer behavior in two directions: Copy$\rightarrow$Recall (suppressing context use) and Recall$\rightarrow$Copy (inducing the model to copy any token from the context). Experiments on two architectures (decoder-only and encoder/decoder) and two open-domain QA benchmarks show consistent behavior shifts under moderate scaling while monitoring accuracy and fluency. Mechanistic analyses of attention routing, MLP contributions, and layer-wise probability trajectories reveal an asymmetry: inducing copying is an easy ``reactivation'' process that can be triggered at different locations in the input, while restoring recall is a ``suppression'' process that is more fragile and strongly tied to object-token interventions.