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Model Editing at Scale leads to Gradual and Catastrophic Forgetting

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arxiv 2401.07453 v4 pith:PCA4GRWX submitted 2024-01-15 cs.CL cs.AIcs.IR

classification cs.CLcs.AIcs.IR
keywords modeleditingforgettingmethodsfactsscalecatastrophicedits
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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Editing knowledge in large language models is an attractive capability to have which allows us to correct incorrectly learnt facts during pre-training, as well as update the model with an ever-growing list of new facts. While existing model editing techniques have shown promise, they are usually evaluated using metrics for reliability, specificity and generalization over one or few edits. We argue that for model editing to have practical utility, we must be able to make multiple edits to the same model. With this in mind, we evaluate the current model editing methods at scale, focusing on two state of the art methods: ROME and MEMIT. We find that as the model is edited sequentially with multiple facts, it continually forgets previously edited facts and the ability to perform downstream tasks. This forgetting happens in two phases -- an initial gradual but progressive forgetting phase followed by abrupt or catastrophic forgetting phase. Both gradual and catastrophic forgetting limit the usefulness of model editing methods at scale -- the former making model editing less effective as multiple edits are made to the model while the latter caps the scalability of such model editing methods. Our analysis also highlights other key limitations of ROME and MEMIT at scale. With our work, we push for the development and evaluation of model editing methods keeping scalability in mind.

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Cited by 6 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Efficient Knowledge Editing via Minimal Precomputation

    cs.CL 2025-06 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Precomputing only a few thousand hidden vectors instead of 44 million is enough for MEMIT, ROME, and EMMET editing to match full-precomputation scores on CounterFact.

  2. COMPKE: Complex Question Answering under Knowledge Editing

    cs.CL 2025-06 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    COMPKE is a new benchmark with 11,924 complex questions that tests knowledge editing through one-to-many relations and logical operations, where existing editing methods often fail.

  3. Reproducibility Study of "AlphaEdit: Null-Space Constrained Knowledge Editing for Language Models"

    cs.LG 2026-06 conditional novelty 5.5 of 10

    Reproducibility study confirms AlphaEdit on original setups but finds performance degrades at high edit counts, fails to generalize to newer models, and harms downstream tasks.

  4. SOS-LoRA: Static Orthogonal-Subspace Low-Rank Adaptation with Fixed Multi-Scale Scaling

    cs.LG 2026-06 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    A LoRA update split into several fixed, differently-scaled low-rank experts with orthogonal input directions improves fine-tuning accuracy at the same parameter count.

  5. AUTOLAW: Enhancing Legal Compliance in Large Language Models via Case Law Generation and Jury-Inspired Deliberation

    cs.CL 2025-05 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    AutoLaw's verifier-ranked legal-role jury with a similar-case demonstration beats majority voting for violation detection on three law and policy benchmarks.

  6. Software Engineering for Large Language Models: Research Status, Challenges and the Road Ahead

    cs.SE 2025-06 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    A literature review organizes LLM development into a six-phase software engineering lifecycle and identifies challenges and research directions for each phase.

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