@inproceedings{wu-etal-2026-capedit,
    title = "{C}a{PE}dit: Capability-Preserving Lifelong Knowledge Editing For Language Models",
    author = "Wu, Song-Li  and
      Du, Zhaocheng  and
      Wang, Xianquan  and
      Wang, Jingyi",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.770/",
    pages = "15710--15752",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
    abstract = "Lifelong knowledge editing (LKE) aims to incrementally correct factual inaccuracies in large language models (LLMs), but sequential edits can lead to substantial degradation of capabilities. Existing approaches primarily rely on static parameter regularization, which restricts knowledge integration and fails to prevent cumulative capability degradation. We argue that an important source of this degradation lies in the temporal mismatch between locally editable factual knowledge and procedural knowledge, which is gradually acquired, guides task execution, and cannot be reliably updated by rapid edits. To this end, we formulate LKE as a dual-timescale process, explicitly decoupling fast-updating factual knowledge from slow-evolving procedural knowledge. Based on this formulation, we propose CaPEdit, a framework that preserves model capabilities under LKE. It first synthesizes procedural knowledge across successive edits, and subsequently performs parameter updates guided jointly by factual supervision and the synthesized procedural signal. To ensure stability under long edit sequences, CaPEdit is trained via a hybrid optimization scheme, combining step-wise updates for rapid factual correction with trajectory-level optimization to facilitate gradual procedural adaptation. Experiments demonstrate that CaPEdit improves capability preservation across all fundamental capabilities by 49.78{\%}, achieves superior editing performance, and requires only 18.07{\%} of the editing time of most existing methods."
}