# Check Your Facts and Try Again: Improving Large Language Models with External Knowledge and Automated Feedback Source: [Check Your Facts and Try Again: Improving Large Language Models with External Knowledge and Automated Feedback]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2025-10-26T01:04:50.062Z Authors: Baolin Peng, Michel Galley, Pengcheng He, Hao Cheng, Yujia Xie, Yu Hu, Qiuyuan Huang, Lars Liden, Zhou Yu, Weizhu Chen, Jianfeng Gao Published: 2023-02-24T18:48:43.000Z ## Abstract Large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, are able to generate human-like, fluent responses for many downstream tasks, e.g., task-oriented dialog and question answering. However, applying LLMs to real-world, mission-critical applications remains challenging mainly due to their tendency to generate hallucinations and their inability to use external knowledge. This paper proposes a LLM-Augmenter system, which augments a black-box LLM with a set of plug-and-play modules. Our system makes the LLM generate responses grounded in external knowledge, e.g., stored in task-specific databases. It also iteratively revises LLM prompts to improve model responses using feedback generated by utility functions, e.g., the factuality score of a LLM-generated response. The effectiveness of LLM-Augmenter is empirically validated on two types of scenarios, task-oriented dialog and open-domain question answering. LLM-Augmenter significantly reduces ChatGPT's hallucinations without sacrificing the fluency and informativeness of its responses. We make the source code and models publicly available. ## Recorded benchmark results A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage. ## Original sources and implementation [Original paper]() [PDF]()