Context-Robust Knowledge Editing for Language Models

Haewon Park, Gyubin Choi, Minjun Kim, Yohan Jo


Abstract
Knowledge editing (KE) methods offer an efficient way to modify knowledge in large language models. Current KE evaluations typically assess editing success by considering only the edited knowledge without any preceding contexts. In real-world applications, however, preceding contexts often trigger the retrieval of the original knowledge and undermine the intended edit. To address this issue, we have developed CHED—a benchmark designed to evaluate the context robustness of KE methods. Evaluations on CHED show that they often fail when preceding contexts are present. To mitigate this shortcoming, we introduce CoRE, a KE method designed to strengthen context robustness by minimizing context-sensitive variance in hidden states of the model for edited knowledge. This method not only improves the editing success rate in situations where a preceding context is present but also preserves the overall capabilities of the model. We also provide an in-depth analysis of the differing impacts of preceding contexts when introduced as user utterances versus assistant responses, and we dissect attention-score patterns to assess how specific tokens influence editing success. We release our dataset and code at [https://github.com/holi-lab/CoRE](https://github.com/holi-lab/CoRE).
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-acl.540
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
10360–10385
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/display_plenaries/2025.findings-acl.540/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Haewon Park, Gyubin Choi, Minjun Kim, and Yohan Jo. 2025. Context-Robust Knowledge Editing for Language Models. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025, pages 10360–10385, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Context-Robust Knowledge Editing for Language Models (Park et al., Findings 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/display_plenaries/2025.findings-acl.540.pdf