SAKE: Steering Activations for Knowledge Editing

Marco Scialanga, Thibault Laugel, Vincent Grari, Marcin Detyniecki


Abstract
As Large Langue Models have been shown to memorize real-world facts, the need to update this knowledge in a controlled and efficient manner arises. Designed with these constraints in mind, Knowledge Editing (KE) approaches propose to alter specific facts in pretrained models. However, they have been shown to suffer from several limitations, including their lack of contextual robustness and their failure to generalize to logical implications related to the fact. To overcome these issues, we propose SAKE, a steering activation method that models a fact to be edited as a distribution rather than a single prompt. Leveraging Optimal Transport, SAKE alters the LLM behavior over a whole fact-related distribution, defined as paraphrases and logical implications. Several numerical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of this method: SAKE is thus able to perform more robust edits than its existing counterparts.
Anthology ID:
2025.acl-long.777
Volume:
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
15966–15978
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.acl-long.777/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Marco Scialanga, Thibault Laugel, Vincent Grari, and Marcin Detyniecki. 2025. SAKE: Steering Activations for Knowledge Editing. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 15966–15978, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
SAKE: Steering Activations for Knowledge Editing (Scialanga et al., ACL 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.acl-long.777.pdf