arXiv AI By Atul Anand

Sequential knowledge editing breaks a model's ability to tell good evidence from bad, without costing it accuracy

Read the original on arXiv AI →

The paper investigates how sequential knowledge editing can degrade a language model’s ability to discern reliable evidence from unreliable evidence without affecting overall accuracy. Using a conservatively tuned LoRA on Qwen2.5‑7B‑Instruct, the authors show that after 1,000 edits the model’s arbitration score for untouched facts drops by 36%, leading to higher error rates on its most confident decisions, while MMLU accuracy remains unchanged. The study also finds that in some model‑method combinations, sequential edits can reduce MMLU to chance levels even though edit success and locality remain perfect.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv AI.

arXiv AI
Sep 17

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.

By Priyansh Srivastava, Romit Chatterjee
arXiv AI
Sep 18

Correct Now, Insufficient Later: Auditing Update Sufficiency in Context Compression

The paper investigates how memory systems can answer a current query correctly yet fail to retain distinctions needed for later updates. Using a paired‑history audit, the authors evaluate 24 history pairs across six synthetic mechanisms and two model backends, achieving perfect reveal accuracy on DeepSeek and high accuracy on GLM. Record‑level audits reveal specific failures in structured reveal memories and frontier late‑reference adequacy, and the authors test a label‑equivariant repair that only partially restores correctness.

By Guangzhe Zhang
arXiv AI
Sep 4

Plan Pointers and Record-Directive Form in Budgeted Verification of Inherited Agent Memory

The paper reports on a series of experiments examining how different forms of directives—such as record pointers, criteria, or combinations—affect an agent’s choice of archived source records when it inherits six one-line memories. Across twelve registered studies involving 14,760 attempts on a single instrument lineage, the authors measured the impact of various directive formats on six direct-provider models, nine OpenRouter-served models, and several Claude and Opus 5 models, noting differences in performance metrics and replication outcomes. The results are purely descriptive, detailing the effects of exact edits on fixed panels with registered intervals and no claim of underlying mechanisms.

By Kazuki Nakayashiki
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