@inproceedings{jeong-etal-2025-steam,
    title = "{STEAM}: A Semantic-Level Knowledge Editing Framework for Large Language Models",
    author = "Jeong, Geunyeong  and
      Sun, Juoh  and
      Lee, Seonghee  and
      Kim, Harksoo",
    editor = "Christodoulopoulos, Christos  and
      Chakraborty, Tanmoy  and
      Rose, Carolyn  and
      Peng, Violet",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025",
    month = nov,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Suzhou, China",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/author-page-yu-wang-polytechnic/2025.findings-emnlp.585/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.findings-emnlp.585",
    pages = "11008--11023",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-335-7",
    abstract = "Large Language Models store extensive factual knowledge acquired during large-scale pre-training. However, this knowledge is inherently static, reflecting only the state of the world at the time of training. Knowledge editing has emerged as a promising solution for updating outdated or incorrect facts without full retraining. However, most existing locate-and-edit methods primarily focus on token-level likelihood optimization without addressing semantic coherence. Our analysis reveals that such edited knowledge is often encoded as isolated residual streams in the model{'}s latent space, distinct from pre-existing knowledge and bypassing natural reasoning process. To address this, we propose STEAM, a semantic-level knowledge editing framework that enhances integration of updated knowledge into the model{'}s knowledge structure. STEAM first identifies target representations as semantic anchors for the updated factual association, then guides the internal representation of the edited fact towards these anchors through an alignment loss during optimization. Experimental results demonstrate that STEAM improves model{'}s ability to reason with edited knowledge and enhances semantic coherence, underscoring the importance of latent-space alignment for reliable and coherent knowledge editing. The code is available at https://github.com/GY-Jeong/STEAM."
}