Static Models, Dynamic World: A Unified Perspective on Temporal Perception in Large Language Models

摘要

Large language models are trained on static corpora but deployed in a dynamic world, leading to systematic temporal failures—from mis-anchored expressions and inconsistent timelines to hallucinated future events, stale world knowledge, and related issues. Existing surveys on temporal knowledge graphs, retrieval-augmented generation, hallucination, and knowledge editing cover only isolated fragments of this space: they are typically task-centric and do not offer a holistic theoretical account of how frozen LLMs represent and reason about time. This survey provides a unified perspective on temporal reasoning in LLMs. We formalize temporal queries in an information-theoretic framework based on the parametric reachability of temporal premises and answers, which induces four temporal information regimes corresponding to internal reasoning, answer recency, premise anchoring, and genuine world indeterminacy. Under this lens, we delineate the landscape of temporal failure modes, consolidate methodologies for diagnosing temporal deficiencies, and synthesize mitigation approaches into a coherent design space. Together, these contributions provide a systematic roadmap toward reliable time-aware large language models.