Knowledge Integration Decay in Search-Augmented Reasoning of Large Language Models

Modern Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex tasks by employing search-augmented reasoning to incorporate external knowledge into long chains of thought. However, we identify a critical yet underexplored bottleneck in this paradigm, termed Knowledge Integration Decay (KID). Specifically, we observe that as the length of reasoning generated before search grows, models increasingly fail to integrate retrieved evidence into subsequent reasoning steps, limiting performance even when relevant information is available. To address this, we propose Self-Anchored Knowledge Encoding (SAKE), a training-free inference-time strategy designed to stabilize knowledge utilization. By anchoring retrieved knowledge at both the beginning and end of the reasoning process, SAKE prevents it from being overshadowed by prior context, thereby preserving its semantic integrity. Extensive experiments on multi-hop QA and complex reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that SAKE significantly mitigates KID and improves performance, offering a lightweight yet effective solution for knowledge integration in agentic LLMs.

DoMIX: An Efficient Framework for Exploiting Domain Knowledge in Fine-Tuning

Domain-Adaptive Pre-training (DAP) has recently gained attention for its effectiveness in fine-tuning pre-trained models. Building on this, continual DAP has been explored to develop pre-trained models capable of incrementally incorporating different domain datasets. However, existing continual DAP methods face several limitations: (1) high computational cost and GPU memory usage during training; (2) sensitivity to incremental data order; and (3) providing a single, generalized model for all end tasks, which contradicts the essence of DAP. In this paper, we propose DoMIX, a novel approach that addresses these challenges by leveraging LoRA modules, a representative parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) method. Our approach enables efficient and parallel domain-adaptive pre-training that is robust to domain order and effectively utilizes accumulated knowledge to provide tailored pre-trained models for specific tasks. We also demonstrate that our method can be extended beyond the DAP setting to standard LLM fine-tuning scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/dohoonkim-ai/DoMIX.