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Main Authors: Yang, Wanli, Sun, Fei, Tan, Jiajun, Ma, Xinyu, Cao, Qi, Yin, Dawei, Shen, Huawei, Cheng, Xueqi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.11177
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author Yang, Wanli
Sun, Fei
Tan, Jiajun
Ma, Xinyu
Cao, Qi
Yin, Dawei
Shen, Huawei
Cheng, Xueqi
author_facet Yang, Wanli
Sun, Fei
Tan, Jiajun
Ma, Xinyu
Cao, Qi
Yin, Dawei
Shen, Huawei
Cheng, Xueqi
contents Despite near-perfect results reported in the literature, the effectiveness of model editing in real-world applications remains unclear. To bridge this gap, we introduce QAEdit, a new benchmark aligned with widely used question answering (QA) datasets, and WILD, a task-agnostic evaluation framework designed to better reflect real-world usage of model editing. Our single editing experiments show that current editing methods perform substantially worse than previously reported (38.5% vs. 96.8%). We demonstrate that it stems from issues in the synthetic evaluation practices of prior work. Among them, the most severe is the use of teacher forcing during testing, which leaks both content and length of the ground truth, leading to overestimated performance. Furthermore, we simulate practical deployment by sequential editing, revealing that current approaches fail drastically with only 1000 edits. This work calls for a shift in model editing research toward rigorous evaluation and the development of robust, scalable methods that can reliably update knowledge in LLMs for real-world use.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_11177
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Mirage of Model Editing: Revisiting Evaluation in the Wild
Yang, Wanli
Sun, Fei
Tan, Jiajun
Ma, Xinyu
Cao, Qi
Yin, Dawei
Shen, Huawei
Cheng, Xueqi
Computation and Language
Despite near-perfect results reported in the literature, the effectiveness of model editing in real-world applications remains unclear. To bridge this gap, we introduce QAEdit, a new benchmark aligned with widely used question answering (QA) datasets, and WILD, a task-agnostic evaluation framework designed to better reflect real-world usage of model editing. Our single editing experiments show that current editing methods perform substantially worse than previously reported (38.5% vs. 96.8%). We demonstrate that it stems from issues in the synthetic evaluation practices of prior work. Among them, the most severe is the use of teacher forcing during testing, which leaks both content and length of the ground truth, leading to overestimated performance. Furthermore, we simulate practical deployment by sequential editing, revealing that current approaches fail drastically with only 1000 edits. This work calls for a shift in model editing research toward rigorous evaluation and the development of robust, scalable methods that can reliably update knowledge in LLMs for real-world use.
title The Mirage of Model Editing: Revisiting Evaluation in the Wild
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.11177