2025.findings-emnlp.565@ACL

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#1 Select to Know: An Internal-External Knowledge Self-Selection Framework for Domain-Specific Question Answering [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi] [REL]

Authors: Bolei He, Xinran He, Run Shao, Shanfu Shu, Xianwei Xue, MingQuan Cheng, Haifeng Li, Zhen-Hua Ling

Large Language Models (LLMs) perform well in general QA but often struggle in domain-specific scenarios. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) introduces external knowledge but suffers from hallucinations and latency due to noisy retrievals. Continued pretraining internalizes domain knowledge but is costly and lacks cross-domain flexibility. We attribute this challenge to the long-tail distribution of domain knowledge, which leaves partial yet useful internal knowledge underutilized. We further argue that knowledge acquisition should be progressive, mirroring human learning: first understanding concepts, then applying them to complex reasoning. To address this, we propose Selct2Know (S2K), a cost-effective framework that internalizes domain knowledge through an internal-external knowledge self-selection strategy and selective supervised fine-tuning. We also introduce a structured reasoning data generation pipeline and integrate GRPO to enhance reasoning ability. Experiments on medical, legal, and financial QA benchmarks show that S2K consistently outperforms existing methods and matches domain-pretrained LLMs with significantly lower cost.

Subject: EMNLP.2025 - Findings