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Main Authors: Zhang, Xue, Liang, Yunlong, Meng, Fandong, Zhang, Songming, Chen, Yufeng, Xu, Jinan, Zhou, Jie
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.16416
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author Zhang, Xue
Liang, Yunlong
Meng, Fandong
Zhang, Songming
Chen, Yufeng
Xu, Jinan
Zhou, Jie
author_facet Zhang, Xue
Liang, Yunlong
Meng, Fandong
Zhang, Songming
Chen, Yufeng
Xu, Jinan
Zhou, Jie
contents Multilingual knowledge editing (MKE) aims to simultaneously update factual knowledge across multiple languages within large language models (LLMs). Previous research indicates that the same knowledge across different languages within LLMs exhibits a degree of shareability. However, most existing MKE methods overlook the connections of the same knowledge between different languages, resulting in knowledge conflicts and limited edit performance. To address this issue, we first investigate how LLMs process multilingual factual knowledge and discover that the same factual knowledge in different languages generally activates a shared set of neurons, which we call language-agnostic factual neurons (LAFNs). These neurons represent the same factual knowledge shared across languages and imply the semantic connections among multilingual knowledge. Inspired by this finding, we propose a new MKE method by Locating and Updating Language-Agnostic Factual Neurons (LU-LAFNs) to edit multilingual knowledge simultaneously, which avoids knowledge conflicts and thus improves edit performance. Experimental results on Bi-ZsRE and MzsRE benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves the best edit performance, indicating the effectiveness and importance of modeling the semantic connections among multilingual knowledge.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_16416
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Multilingual Knowledge Editing with Language-Agnostic Factual Neurons
Zhang, Xue
Liang, Yunlong
Meng, Fandong
Zhang, Songming
Chen, Yufeng
Xu, Jinan
Zhou, Jie
Computation and Language
Multilingual knowledge editing (MKE) aims to simultaneously update factual knowledge across multiple languages within large language models (LLMs). Previous research indicates that the same knowledge across different languages within LLMs exhibits a degree of shareability. However, most existing MKE methods overlook the connections of the same knowledge between different languages, resulting in knowledge conflicts and limited edit performance. To address this issue, we first investigate how LLMs process multilingual factual knowledge and discover that the same factual knowledge in different languages generally activates a shared set of neurons, which we call language-agnostic factual neurons (LAFNs). These neurons represent the same factual knowledge shared across languages and imply the semantic connections among multilingual knowledge. Inspired by this finding, we propose a new MKE method by Locating and Updating Language-Agnostic Factual Neurons (LU-LAFNs) to edit multilingual knowledge simultaneously, which avoids knowledge conflicts and thus improves edit performance. Experimental results on Bi-ZsRE and MzsRE benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves the best edit performance, indicating the effectiveness and importance of modeling the semantic connections among multilingual knowledge.
title Multilingual Knowledge Editing with Language-Agnostic Factual Neurons
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.16416