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Blind Men and the Elephant: Probing the Epistemic Myopia of LLMs under Long-Tail Divergent Knowledge

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Representative image for Blind Men and the Elephant: Probing the Epistemic Myopia of LLMs under Long-Tail Divergent Knowledge

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TL;DR - ElephantBench evaluates whether LLMs retain multiple conflicting accounts of long-tail facts rather than only a dominant answer. Across 32 models, even the strongest recovered both accounts for just 52.4% of questions, revealing persistent incompleteness in parametric memory.

  • The benchmark contains 1,094 closed-book QA questions built from naturally divergent accounts found through an auditable, graph-based pipeline.
  • Answers are traceable to source documents, checked against authoritative public sources, and reviewed by human annotators.
  • Larger models and inference-time reasoning improve recall but do not eliminate the tendency to omit one account.
  • More balanced corpus exposure correlates with more complete recall, while exposure imbalance favors the dominant account.

Sources (1)

Blind Men and the Elephant: Probing the Epistemic Myopia of LLMs under Long-Tail Divergent Knowledge

arXiv cs.CL Zhuoshi Pan, Junru Lu, Yan Qian, H. Vicky Zhao, Di Yin, Xing Sun 2026-08-28 arXiv:2608.28478
Public signals Hugging Face upvotes 19
Providers: Hugging Face · Upvotes 19 OpenAlex · N/A Publisher · N/A Semantic Scholar · N/A X · N/A Fetched 2026-09-25 14:25:53.815917 UTC

TL;DR - ElephantBench evaluates whether LLMs retain multiple conflicting accounts of long-tail facts rather than only a dominant answer. Across 32 models, even the strongest recovered both accounts for just 52.4% of questions, revealing persistent incompleteness in parametric memory.

  • The benchmark contains 1,094 closed-book QA questions built from naturally divergent accounts found through an auditable, graph-based pipeline.
  • Answers are traceable to source documents, checked against authoritative public sources, and reviewed by human annotators.
  • Larger models and inference-time reasoning improve recall but do not eliminate the tendency to omit one account.
  • More balanced corpus exposure correlates with more complete recall, while exposure imbalance favors the dominant account.
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