CoME: An Unlearning-based Approach to Conflict-free Model Editing

Dahyun Jung, Jaehyung Seo, Jaewook Lee, Chanjun Park, Heuiseok Lim


Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) often retain outdated or incorrect information from pre-training, which undermines their reliability. While model editing methods have been developed to address such errors without full re-training, they frequently suffer from knowledge conflicts, where outdated information interferes with new knowledge. In this work, we propose Conflict-free Model Editing (CoME), a novel framework that enhances the accuracy of knowledge updates in LLMs by selectively removing outdated knowledge. CoME leverages unlearning to mitigate knowledge interference, allowing new information to be integrated without compromising relevant linguistic features. Through experiments on GPT-J and LLaMA-3 using Counterfact and ZsRE datasets, we demonstrate that CoME improves both editing accuracy and model reliability when applied to existing editing methods. Our results highlight that the targeted removal of outdated knowledge is crucial for enhancing model editing effectiveness and maintaining the model’s generative performance.
Anthology ID:
2025.naacl-long.325
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
April
Year:
2025
Address:
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Editors:
Luis Chiruzzo, Alan Ritter, Lu Wang
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6410–6422
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/Author-page-Marten-During-lu/2025.naacl-long.325/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Dahyun Jung, Jaehyung Seo, Jaewook Lee, Chanjun Park, and Heuiseok Lim. 2025. CoME: An Unlearning-based Approach to Conflict-free Model Editing. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 6410–6422, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
CoME: An Unlearning-based Approach to Conflict-free Model Editing (Jung et al., NAACL 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/Author-page-Marten-During-lu/2025.naacl-long.325.pdf