arXiv AI

Suppressed, Not Erased: A Representational Trace of Edited Facts Survives Even Weight-Free Knowledge Editing

The paper investigates whether knowledge editing truly erases original facts from language models. Using a linear trace probe, the authors find that after editing a fact in GPT‑2‑XL, the original object remains highly decodable from hidden states across three different editing methods, even when the model behaves correctly on edited prompts. This suggests that editing suppresses rather than removes the original association in representational space.

arXiv AI
Sep 4

When Models Edit Too Much: On the Fidelity of Minimal Code Edits

The paper investigates the problem of over‑editing by large language models when repairing code, showing that even state‑of‑the‑art models like GPT‑5.5 frequently rewrite more code than necessary. Using a benchmark of 400 BigCodeBench problems with controlled AST corruptions, the authors quantify excess edits and demonstrate that a simple preservation instruction can reduce unnecessary changes and improve pass rates. They further explore training strategies, finding that reinforcement learning yields the best balance between edit fidelity and performance retention, highlighting edit fidelity as a distinct, measurable dimension of code‑repair quality.

By Tongyao Zhu, Wei Hern Lim, Min-Yen Kan
arXiv AI
1d ago

Contiguity, Not Importance: Budgeted Repair of Stale KV Caches After Document Edits

The paper investigates how to efficiently repair stale key-value (KV) caches in retrieval‑augmented generation systems after document edits. It proposes a budgeted in‑place recomputation approach and evaluates training‑free position‑selection policies on a factual RAG benchmark. Across three model families, a contiguous edit‑local window consistently recovers most of the post‑edit answer quality while being 13–21 times faster than a full re‑prefill, though its effectiveness diminishes when answer‑bearing text moves downstream.

By Mingyang Mao, Wyatt Mackey, Xiaomin Lin
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

Can an AI Assistant Really Forget? Auditable Deletion from Addressable Memory

This paper introduces a deletion interface for a pretrained language model, measuring how effectively deleted records are removed from the model’s memory. By retrofitting a support‑vector memory gate into the global attention layers of a frozen Gemma 3, the authors show that deletions can be performed without altering weights and that the resulting state is close to a reference state that never stored the record. Experiments on 4B‑parameter models demonstrate low perplexity impact and strong evidence that deleted content is hard to recover, while larger or smaller models fail to achieve the same guarantees.

By Vishwajith Ramesh
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 3

When Models Edit Too Much: On the Fidelity of Minimal Code Edits

The paper investigates the problem of over‑editing by large language models (LLMs) when repairing code, showing that even state‑of‑the‑art models like GPT‑5.5 often rewrite more code than necessary. Using a benchmark of 400 BigCodeBench problems with controlled AST‑level corruptions, the authors quantify over‑editing and demonstrate that a simple preservation instruction can significantly reduce excess edits and cognitive complexity while improving Pass@1. They further explore post‑training strategies, finding that reinforcement learning yields the best balance between edit fidelity and performance retention, thereby establishing edit fidelity as a distinct, measurable dimension of code‑repair quality.

arXiv AI
Aug 26

When Can One Neuron Fix Repetition Loops in LLMs?

The paper investigates whether targeted edits to a few internal components of Gemma 4 instruction‑tuned models can reduce persistent repetition loops that occur during long factual enumeration prompts. By combining per‑layer ablation with per‑neuron attribution, the authors identify specific neurons whose weight edits dramatically lower loop frequency—one sign‑inverted neuron suffices for Gemma 4 E2B. Across all four Gemma variants, loop occurrences drop from 46/384 to 12/384 on held‑out prompts, while general‑purpose benchmarks show no significant regressions. The study also demonstrates that similar sparse edits can mitigate repetition in other families such as Qwen3.5 and LFM2.5, though the effect varies.

By Aristotelis Lazaridis, Aman Sharma, Dylan Bates, Brian King, Vincent Lu, Jack FitzGerald