CLICKER: Cross-Lingual Knowledge Editing via In-Context Learning with Adaptive Stepwise Reasoning

Zehui Jiang, Xin Zhao, Yuta Kumadaki, Naoki Yoshinaga


Abstract
As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as multilingual services, keeping their factual knowledge accurate across languages has become both essential and challenging. However, most of the existing knowledge editing (KE) methods are static, in that they update parameters offline for given accumulated edits of knowledge, and are struggling to effectively propagate edits in one language to others, while avoiding side effects. To mitigate this issue, we propose **CLICKER**, a KE method with stepwise reasoning that dynamically retrieves only knowledge relevant to a given query and then edit, while maintaining cross-lingual consistency through: (1) relevance-aware knowledge retrieval, (2) on-demand in-context KE, and (3) language alignment of the outputs. To rigorously evaluate the locality of edits in cross-lingual KE, we develop **Multi-CounterFact** dataset that contain many semantically-similar but irrelevant prompts for the edit. Experiments on Multi-CounterFact and MzsRE with both open- and closed-source LLMs confirmed that CLICKER effectively localizes edits and resolves cross-lingual inconsistencies, outperforming dynamic KE baselines.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-eacl.264
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026
Month:
March
Year:
2026
Address:
Rabat, Morocco
Editors:
Vera Demberg, Kentaro Inui, Lluís Marquez
Venue:
Findings
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5007–5022
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.findings-eacl.264/
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Cite (ACL):
Zehui Jiang, Xin Zhao, Yuta Kumadaki, and Naoki Yoshinaga. 2026. CLICKER: Cross-Lingual Knowledge Editing via In-Context Learning with Adaptive Stepwise Reasoning. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026, pages 5007–5022, Rabat, Morocco. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
CLICKER: Cross-Lingual Knowledge Editing via In-Context Learning with Adaptive Stepwise Reasoning (Jiang et al., Findings 2026)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.findings-eacl.264.pdf
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