cm-two-primary-causes

IN premise — summaries/2026/08/24/xu-2024-knowledge-conflicts-survey-s1-introduction.md

Created 2026-08-25T02:59:01+00:00

The two primary causes of context-memory conflict are temporal misalignment (training data outdated, context is correct) and misinformation pollution (context contains false info, memory is correct).

Summary

When what a system remembers clashes with the information it is being fed in the moment, the disagreement almost always comes down to one of two things: either the system was trained on outdated facts and the new information is simply more current, or the new information is itself wrong and the stored knowledge holds up. Distinguishing between these two cases matters because it determines which side should win the conflict, which in turn decides whether to update the old memory or discard the bad context.