Right Knowledge, Wrong Answer: Test-Time Steering for Temporal Fact Conflicts in Open-Weight Language Models

arXiv:2606.20959v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models can store both outdated facts and newer superseding facts in their parameters, but standard prompting may still elicit the outdated answer. We formalize this problem as Parametric Temporal Conflict (PTC) and introduce Temporal Attractor Steering (TAS), a three-stage test-time intervention that detects likely conflicts, identifies a conflict-critical layer, and steers hidden states toward newer-fact representations without retr...