Norm Growth and Stability Challenges in Localized Sequential Knowledge Editing

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Gupta, Akshat, Fang, Christine, Ozdemir, Atahan, Lu, Maochuan, Alaa, Ahmed, Hartvigsen, Thomas, Anumanchipalli, Gopala
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Gupta, Akshat
Fang, Christine
Ozdemir, Atahan
Lu, Maochuan
Alaa, Ahmed
Hartvigsen, Thomas
Anumanchipalli, Gopala
author_facet Gupta, Akshat
Fang, Christine
Ozdemir, Atahan
Lu, Maochuan
Alaa, Ahmed
Hartvigsen, Thomas
Anumanchipalli, Gopala
contents This study investigates the impact of localized updates to large language models (LLMs), specifically in the context of knowledge editing - a task aimed at incorporating or modifying specific facts without altering broader model capabilities. We first show that across different post-training interventions like continuous pre-training, full fine-tuning and LORA-based fine-tuning, the Frobenius norm of the updated matrices always increases. This increasing norm is especially detrimental for localized knowledge editing, where only a subset of matrices are updated in a model . We reveal a consistent phenomenon across various editing techniques, including fine-tuning, hypernetwork-based approaches, and locate-and-edit methods: the norm of the updated matrix invariably increases with successive updates. Such growth disrupts model balance, particularly when isolated matrices are updated while the rest of the model remains static, leading to potential instability and degradation of downstream performance. Upon deeper investigations of the intermediate activation vectors, we find that the norm of internal activations decreases and is accompanied by shifts in the subspaces occupied by these activations, which shows that these activation vectors now occupy completely different regions in the representation space compared to the unedited model. With our paper, we highlight the technical challenges with continuous and localized sequential knowledge editing and their implications for maintaining model stability and utility.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_19416
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Norm Growth and Stability Challenges in Localized Sequential Knowledge Editing
Gupta, Akshat
Fang, Christine
Ozdemir, Atahan
Lu, Maochuan
Alaa, Ahmed
Hartvigsen, Thomas
Anumanchipalli, Gopala
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
This study investigates the impact of localized updates to large language models (LLMs), specifically in the context of knowledge editing - a task aimed at incorporating or modifying specific facts without altering broader model capabilities. We first show that across different post-training interventions like continuous pre-training, full fine-tuning and LORA-based fine-tuning, the Frobenius norm of the updated matrices always increases. This increasing norm is especially detrimental for localized knowledge editing, where only a subset of matrices are updated in a model . We reveal a consistent phenomenon across various editing techniques, including fine-tuning, hypernetwork-based approaches, and locate-and-edit methods: the norm of the updated matrix invariably increases with successive updates. Such growth disrupts model balance, particularly when isolated matrices are updated while the rest of the model remains static, leading to potential instability and degradation of downstream performance. Upon deeper investigations of the intermediate activation vectors, we find that the norm of internal activations decreases and is accompanied by shifts in the subspaces occupied by these activations, which shows that these activation vectors now occupy completely different regions in the representation space compared to the unedited model. With our paper, we highlight the technical challenges with continuous and localized sequential knowledge editing and their implications for maintaining model stability and utility.
title Norm Growth and Stability Challenges in Localized Sequential Knowledge Editing
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.19416