Memory-Augmented Knowledge Fusion with Safety-Aware Decoding for Domain-Adaptive Question Answering

Abstract: Domain-specific question answering (QA) systems for services face unique challenges in integrating heterogeneous knowledge sources while ensuring both accuracy and safety. Existing LLMs often struggle with factual consistency and context alignment in sensitive domains such as healthcare policies and government welfare. In this work, we introduce Knowledge-Aware Reasoning and Memory-Augmented Adaptation (KARMA), a novel framework designed to enhance QA performance in care scenarios. KARMA incorporates a dual-encoder architecture to fuse structured and unstructured knowledge sources, a gated memory unit to dynamically regulate external knowledge integration, and a safety-aware controllable decoder that mitigates unsafe outputs using safety classification and guided generation techniques. Extensive experiments on a proprietary QA dataset demonstrate that KARMA outperforms strong baselines in both answer quality and safety. This study offers a comprehensive solution for building trustworthy and adaptive QA systems in service contexts.