.@NitCal will be presenting "Empty Shelves or Lost Keys? Recall Is the Bottleneck for Parametric Factuality" at ICML 2026 next month.
(tl;dr: we show encoding is near-saturated on frontier LLMs, but models still struggle to recall encoded facts.)
One recurring piece of feedback we've gotten since posting the paper: "you show LLMs struggle with factual recall, but does that even matter when today's agents can use external retrieval?"
Here's how I currently think about this, and more broadly about the role of parametric knowledge in today's systems:
The theoretical argument for why knowledge matters (true in principle, but I don't know of work that measures this in practice): parametric knowledge is important for making efficient use of search and for knowing how to properly integrate retrieved information. Imagine finding some weird pizza recipe online — can you trust it without knowing a lot about cooking, chemistry, etc.? I think this is going to become a bigger issue moving forward, the more "sloppier" the internet becomes.
The realistic case for why knowledge matters: today's agents are far from producing responses that are fully grounded in external evidence. Even when search triggers properly — which it often doesn't — only the "big" claims tend to be grounded, while models still volunteer a lot of extra information from their parametric knowledge.
Since models are still poor at "knowing what they know" (more on that in my next post, about our other ICML paper...), our best bet is making models actually more knowledgeable — and our paper reveals where the headroom for that actually lies.
Eyal Ben-David retweeted
Our paper got accepted to @icmlconf! 🥳🥳
I also want to say a few warm words about the reviewers and AC. Maybe because our paper was under Policy A (LLM use is prohibited), but the review process felt unusually professional and refreshing, almost like a reminder of pre-2024 peer review 😇
I hope more authors get to experience this kind of review process in the future.
[1/7] Why do frontier LLMs make factual errors?
Is it because they never learned the fact…
or because they can’t access knowledge they already encoded?
In our new paper, we show:
The bottleneck is not encoding; it is recall. 🧵👇
Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2602.14080
Many thanks to @_galyo @bd_eyal @zorikgekhman @eran_ofek59358 @GoogleResearch
Eyal Ben-David retweeted
GenAI has moved from aspiration to a core requirement. For enterprises, the question is no longer "what can it do?" but "how reliably can it do it?"
At @Google, we view factuality as the essential foundation for this next phase of AI utility. (1/4)
Eyal Ben-David retweeted
[1/7] Why do frontier LLMs make factual errors?
Is it because they never learned the fact…
or because they can’t access knowledge they already encoded?
In our new paper, we show:
The bottleneck is not encoding; it is recall. 🧵👇
Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2602.14080
Many thanks to @_galyo @bd_eyal @zorikgekhman @eran_ofek59358 @GoogleResearch
Eyal Ben-David retweeted
Google presents Empty Shelves or Lost Keys?
Recall Is the Bottleneck for Parametric Factuality
paper: huggingface.co/papers/2602.1…
Eyal Ben-David retweeted
Recall is the bottleneck for parametric factuality in frontier LLMs
Encoding is nearly saturated—GPT-5 & Gemini-3 encode 95-98% of facts. The issue isn't missing knowledge ("empty shelves"), but accessing it ("lost keys"). Many errors stem from recall failures, not knowledge gaps.
Eyal Ben-David retweeted
We’ve developed the FACTS Benchmark Suite with @GoogleResearch. 📊
It’s the industry’s first comprehensive test evaluating LLM factuality across four dimensions: internal model knowledge, web search, grounding, and multimodal inputs.
Eyal Ben-David retweeted
Happy to share that our work was accepted to @COLM_conf 2025 ! 🇨🇦🍁
Eyal Ben-David retweeted
בהמשך לדיון אתמול על התאמת מודלים למשימה ספציפית, הנה מאמר מעניין של חוקרים ישראלים שמראים איך אפשר לשפר ייעלות של מודלים בזכות התאמה של המודל לתחום פעילות ספציפי מאוד.
Eyal Ben-David retweeted
🚨 It's often claimed that LLMs know more facts than they show in their outputs, but what does this actually mean, and how can we measure this “hidden knowledge”?
In our new paper, we clearly define this concept and design controlled experiments to test it.
1/🧵
Eyal Ben-David retweeted
1/🧵 New preprint: AdaptiVocab 📢
A lightweight method to make LLMs ~25% faster in domain-specific settings—without compromising quality.
We adapt the vocabulary on top of your tokenizer to fit the domain.
No architecture changes. No retraining from scratch.
Eyal Ben-David retweeted
Our paper on the cultural encoding capabilities of Text-to-Image models has been accepted to TACL !
We dive into the question of what cultural encoding means and how to measure it, and show that with the appropriate prompt gensrating cultural-aware images is largely possible.
🎉 Our paper "𝐍𝐚𝐯𝐢𝐠𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐂𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐚𝐥 𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐬𝐦𝐬: 𝐄𝐱𝐩𝐥𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐔𝐧𝐥𝐨𝐜𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐂𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐚𝐥 𝐏𝐎𝐕 𝐨𝐟 𝐓𝐞𝐱𝐭-𝐭𝐨-𝐈𝐦𝐚𝐠𝐞 𝐌𝐨𝐝𝐞𝐥𝐬" is accepted to 𝐓𝐀𝐂𝐋!
@bd_eyal @roireichart @annalkorhonen
arxiv.org/abs/2310.01929
1/11
Eyal Ben-David retweeted
🎉 Our paper "𝐍𝐚𝐯𝐢𝐠𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐂𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐚𝐥 𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐬𝐦𝐬: 𝐄𝐱𝐩𝐥𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐔𝐧𝐥𝐨𝐜𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐂𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐚𝐥 𝐏𝐎𝐕 𝐨𝐟 𝐓𝐞𝐱𝐭-𝐭𝐨-𝐈𝐦𝐚𝐠𝐞 𝐌𝐨𝐝𝐞𝐥𝐬" is accepted to 𝐓𝐀𝐂𝐋!
@bd_eyal @roireichart @annalkorhonen
arxiv.org/abs/2310.01929
1/11
Eyal Ben-David retweeted
🚨 Last chance to apply for an internship role at Google Research in 2025 — we have truly brilliant opportunities available for interns, and many internships have turned into highly impactful research projects.
BSc/MSc: google.com/about/careers/app…
PhD: google.com/about/careers/app…
Eyal Ben-David retweeted
Happy to share that TACT was accepted to NeurIPS D&B 2024 @NeurIPSConf 🎊
🚨 New Paper 🚨
Are current LLMs up to the task of solving *complex* instructions based on content-rich text?
Our new dataset, TACT, sheds some light on this challenge.
How does it work?
arxiv.org/abs/2406.03618
Work by @GoogleAI & @GoogleDeepMind
👇🧵
Eyal Ben-David retweeted
Happy to share that 4 of our papers, together with our collaborators at @GoogleAI, the Hebrew University, Bar-Ilan Univesrity and @NVIDIAAI has been accepted to @emnlpmeeting (two to the main conference, two to findings):
Eyal Ben-David retweeted
Google presents CoverBench: A Challenging Benchmark for Complex Claim Verification
Provides a significant challenge to current models with
large headroom
arxiv.org/abs/2408.03325
Eyal Ben-David retweeted
Google announces CoverBench
A Challenging Benchmark for Complex Claim Verification
discuss: huggingface.co/papers/2408.0…
There is a growing line of research on verifying the correctness of language models' outputs. At the same time, LMs are being used to tackle complex queries that require reasoning. We introduce CoverBench, a challenging benchmark focused on verifying LM outputs in complex reasoning settings. Datasets that can be used for this purpose are often designed for other complex reasoning tasks (e.g., QA) targeting specific use-cases (e.g., financial tables), requiring transformations, negative sampling and selection of hard examples to collect such a benchmark. CoverBench provides a diversified evaluation for complex claim verification in a variety of domains, types of reasoning, relatively long inputs, and a variety of standardizations, such as multiple representations for tables where available, and a consistent schema. We manually vet the data for quality to ensure low levels of label noise. Finally, we report a variety of competitive baseline results to show CoverBench is challenging and has very significant headroom.
Eyal Ben-David retweeted
New complex reasoning eval set!
CoverBench: Verify whether a claim is correct given a rich context. It requires implicit complex reasoning.
It's efficient (<1k ex), convenient (binary classification), and hard. Take a look!
arxiv.org/abs/2408.03325
huggingface.co/datasets/goog…
Eyal Ben-David retweeted
This is quite a valuable resource from @GoogleA for evaluating the complex reasoning and numerical calculation capabilities of large language models. A few key takeaways:
'TACT: Advancing Complex Aggregative Reasoning with Information Extraction Tools'
📌 The TACT (Text And Calculations through Tables) dataset challenges LLMs' reasoning and computational abilities on complex instructions that require aggregating information scattered across texts and performing complex integration on this information to generate the answer. TACT instances consist of the original text, the written instruction, and a gold answer, all requiring advanced text comprehension and reasoning.
📌 TACT was constructed by leveraging the InstructIE dataset, which contains texts and their associated tables. For each table, experts formulated new queries and gathered their respective answers. The dataset creation process involved 1) Initial review and relevance vetting, 2) Numerical aspect identification, 3) Natural language instruction formulation, 4) Natural language query over the table, 5) Translation to Pandas commands and gold response extraction, and 6) Command execution and validation.
📌 Experiments show that all contemporary LLMs perform poorly on TACT, achieving an accuracy below 38%. To pinpoint the difficulties, the authors analyze model performance across three components: table-generation, Pandas command-generation, and execution.
📌 To address these challenges, the authors propose the "IE as a tool" framework. The key idea is to solve TACT instructions through the sequential invocation of two tools: one that generates a table from the text and instruction, and one that generates a corresponding Pandas command. The model then executes the command, along with the original instruction and text, to produce the final answer. The authors implement each tool with few-shot prompting.
📌 The IE as a tool approach shows a 12% improvement over existing prompting techniques on TACT. Analyzing the performance on the individual table-generation and Pandas command-generation tasks reveals significant headroom in each, suggesting that focused few-shot prompting can considerably enhance performance. This aligns with the authors' finding that each dissected component of the TACT task has untapped potential for improvement.
































