Robust and Scalable Model Editing for Large Language Models
Yingfa Chen, Zhengyan Zhang, Xu Han, Chaojun Xiao, Zhiyuan Liu, Chen Chen, Kuai Li, Tao Yang, Maosong Sun
Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) can make predictions using *parametric knowledge* – knowledge encoded in the model weights – or *contextual knowledge* – knowledge presented in the context. In many scenarios, a desirable behavior is that LLMs give precedence to contextual knowledge when it conflicts with the parametric knowledge, and fall back to using their parametric knowledge when the context is irrelevant. This enables updating and correcting the model’s knowledge by in-context editing instead of retraining. Previous works have shown that LLMs are inclined to ignore contextual knowledge and fail to reliably fall back to parametric knowledge when presented with irrelevant context. In this work, we discover that, with proper prompting methods, instruction-finetuned LLMs can be highly controllable by contextual knowledge and robust to irrelevant context. Utilizing this feature, we propose EREN (Edit models by REading Notes) to improve the scalability and robustness of LLM editing. To better evaluate the robustness of model editors, we collect a new dataset, that contains irrelevant questions that are more challenging than the ones in existing datasets. Empirical results show that our method outperforms current state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. Unlike existing techniques, it can integrate knowledge from multiple edits, and correctly respond to syntactically similar but semantically unrelated inputs (and vice versa). The source code can be found at https://github.com/thunlp/EREN.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.lrec-main.1235
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- Torino, Italia
- Editors:
- Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
- Venues:
- LREC | COLING
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- ELRA and ICCL
- Note:
- Pages:
- 14157–14172
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1235
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Yingfa Chen, Zhengyan Zhang, Xu Han, Chaojun Xiao, Zhiyuan Liu, Chen Chen, Kuai Li, Tao Yang, and Maosong Sun. 2024. Robust and Scalable Model Editing for Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 14157–14172, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
- Cite (Informal):
- Robust and Scalable Model Editing for Large Language Models (Chen et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-2/2024.lrec-main.1235.pdf