arXiv subjects

Hazem Amamou

Publications and source records attributed to Hazem Amamou.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

How Temperature Shapes Ideological Discourse in Retrieval-Augmented Generation?

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has been increasingly adopted to reduce hallucinations and strengthen the factual grounding of large language models (LLMs). While robustness to errors in the retrieval process has been explored, the impact of ideological bias on LLM outputs has been overlooked. For instance, if the retrieved material contains ideological positions, the RAG may transmit, amplify, or suppress such ideological discourses in its outputs. In this study, we address this issue by examining the influence of the RAG framework, comprising ideological discourses, in LLM-generated answers. To this end, we applied Lexical Multidimensional Analysis (LMDA) on a corpus of 1,117 COVID-19 treatment articles, identifying three ideological discourses. This corpus is then used as the external knowledge source for the RAG. We assessed several LLMs by having the models answer ideological questions at different sampling temperatures. The generated texts were assessed semantically and lexically based on their similarities with ideological reference texts. Our findings show that the RAG framework is prone to transferring ideological discourses into LLM responses, with sampling temperature having a measurable impact on the strength of this transfer. Discoursive alignment between generated answers and the reference text is highest at moderate temperatures, where models balance stochasticity with retrieval grounding, and drops at low temperatures, indicating that overly deterministic sampling suppresses discourse transfer.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

The Impact of Ideological Discourses in RAG: A Case Study with COVID-19 Treatments

This paper studies the impact of retrieved ideological texts on the outputs of large language models (LLMs). While interest in understanding ideology in LLMs has recently increased, little attention has been given to this issue in the context of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). To fill this gap, we design an external knowledge source based on ideological loaded texts about COVID-19 treatments. Our corpus is based on 1,117 academic articles representing discourses about controversial and endorsed treatments for the disease. We propose a corpus linguistics framework, based on Lexical Multidimensional Analysis (LMDA), to identify the ideologies within the corpus. LLMs are tasked to answer questions derived from three identified ideological dimensions, and two types of contextual prompts are adopted: the first comprises the user question and ideological texts; and the second contains the question, ideological texts, and LMDA descriptions. Ideological alignment between reference ideological texts and LLMs' responses is assessed using cosine similarity for lexical and semantic representations. Results demonstrate that LLMs' responses based on ideological retrieved texts are more aligned with the ideology encountered in the external knowledge, with the enhanced prompt further influencing LLMs' outputs. Our findings highlight the importance of identifying ideological discourses within the RAG framework in order to mitigate not just unintended ideological bias, but also the risks of malicious manipulation of such models.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Towards Robust Retrieval-Augmented Generation Based on Knowledge Graph: A Comparative Analysis

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) was introduced to enhance the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) beyond their encoded prior knowledge. This is achieved by providing LLMs with an external source of knowledge, which helps reduce factual hallucinations and enables access to new information not available during pretraining. However, inconsistent retrieved information can negatively affect LLM responses. The Retrieval-Augmented Generation Benchmark (RGB) was introduced to evaluate the robustness of RAG systems under such conditions. In this work, we use the RGB corpus to evaluate LLMs in four scenarios: noise robustness, information integration, negative rejection, and counterfactual robustness. We perform a comparative analysis between the RGB RAG baseline and GraphRAG, a knowledge graph based retrieval system. We test three GraphRAG customizations to improve robustness. Results show improvements over the RGB baseline and provide insights for designing more reliable RAG systems for real world scenarios.

cs.CL↗