Sebastian Pohl


2025

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Towards a Principled Evaluation of Knowledge Editors
Sebastian Pohl | Max Ploner | Alan Akbik
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Large Language Model Memorization (L2M2)

Model editing has been gaining increasing attention over the past few years. For Knowledge Editing in particular, more challenging evaluation datasets have recently been released. These datasets use different methodologies to score the success of editors. Yet, it remains under-explored how robust these methodologies are and whether they unfairly favor some editors. Moreover, the disruptive impact of these editors on overall model capabilities remains a constant blind spot.We address both of these problems and show that choosing different metrics and evaluation methodologies as well as different edit batch sizes can lead to a different ranking of knowledge editors. Crucially we demonstrate this effect also on general language understanding tasks evaluated alongside the knowledge editing tasks. Further we include a manual assessment of the string matching based evaluation method for knowledge editing that is favored by recently released datasets, revealing a tendency to produce false positive matches.

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LM-Pub-Quiz: A Comprehensive Framework for Zero-Shot Evaluation of Relational Knowledge in Language Models
Max Ploner | Jacek Wiland | Sebastian Pohl | Alan Akbik
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (System Demonstrations)

Knowledge probing evaluates to which extent a language model (LM) has acquired relational knowledge during its pre-training phase. It provides a cost-effective means of comparing LMs of different sizes and training setups and is useful for monitoring knowledge gained or lost during continual learning (CL). In prior work, we presented an improved knowledge probe called BEAR (Wiland et al., 2024), which enables the comparison of LMs trained with different pre-training objectives (causal and masked LMs) and addresses issues of skewed distributions in previous probes to deliver a more unbiased reading of LM knowledge. With this paper, we present LM-Pub-Quiz, a Python framework and leaderboard built around the BEAR probing mechanism that enables researchers and practitioners to apply it in their work. It provides options for standalone evaluation and direct integration into the widely-used training pipeline of the Hugging Face transformers library. Further, it provides a fine-grained analysis of different knowledge types to assist users in better understanding the knowledge in each evaluated LM. We publicly release LM-Pub-Quiz as an open-source project.https://lm-pub-quiz.github.io/