im-three-causes-pipeline-stages
IN premise — summaries/2026/08/24/xu-2024-knowledge-conflicts-survey-s1-introduction.md
Created 2026-08-25T02:59:01+00:00
Intra-memory conflict has three causes mapped to pipeline stages: training corpus bias (pre-training), decoding strategy effects (inference), and knowledge editing side effects (post-update).
Summary
When a model's internal knowledge contradicts itself, the root cause always traces back to one of three points in its lifecycle: the data it learned from, the way it generates responses, or edits made to it after the fact. This turns a vague "the model is confused" problem into a structured diagnostic, because you now know exactly which stage to investigate when a conflict shows up.