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Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance on various natural language tasks. However, they are trained on static corpora and their knowledge can become outdated quickly in the fast-changing world. This motivates the development of knowledge editing (KE) to update specific knowledge in LLMs without changing unrelated others or compromising their pre-trained capabilities. Previous efforts sought to update a small amount of parameters of a LLM and proved effective for making selective updates. Nonetheless, the edited LLM often exhibits degraded ability to reason about the new knowledge. In this work, we identify a key issue: \textit{heterogeneous token overfitting} (HTO), where the LLM overfits different tokens in the provided knowledge at varying rates. To tackle this, we propose {\NAME}, a token-level smoothing method that mitigates HTO by adaptively refining the target distribution. Theoretically, {\NAME} offers better parameter updates with negligible computation overhead. It also induces an implicit DPO but does not require preference data pairs. Extensive experiments across four editing methods, two LLMs, and diverse scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness and versatility of our method.
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This content will become publicly available on November 11, 2025
Knowledge Editing for Large Language Models: A Survey
Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently transformed both the academic and industrial landscapes due to their remarkable capacity to understand, analyze, and generate texts based on their vast knowledge and reasoning ability. Nevertheless, one major drawback of LLMs is their substantial computational cost for pre-training due to their unprecedented amounts of parameters. The disadvantage is exacerbated when new knowledge frequently needs to be introduced into the pre-trained model. Therefore, it is imperative to develop effective and efficient techniques to update pre-trained LLMs. Traditional methods encode new knowledge in pre-trained LLMs through direct fine-tuning. However, naively re-training LLMs can be computationally intensive and risks degenerating valuable pre-trained knowledge irrelevant to the update in the model. Recently,Knowledge-based Model Editing(KME), also known asKnowledge EditingorModel Editing, has attracted increasing attention, which aims at precisely modifying the LLMs to incorporate specific knowledge, without negatively influencing other irrelevant knowledge. In this survey, we aim at providing a comprehensive and in-depth overview of recent advances in the field of KME. We first introduce a general formulation of KME to encompass different KME strategies. Afterward, we provide an innovative taxonomy of KME techniques based on how the new knowledge is introduced into pre-trained LLMs, and investigate existing KME strategies while analyzing key insights, advantages, and limitations of methods from each category. Moreover, representative metrics, datasets, and applications of KME are introduced accordingly. Finally, we provide an in-depth analysis regarding the practicality and remaining challenges of KME and suggest promising research directions for further advancement in this field.
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- PAR ID:
- 10612752
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ACM Computing Surveys
- Volume:
- 57
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 0360-0300
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 37
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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