Outdated Issue Aware Decoding for Factual Knowledge Editing

Zengkui Sun, Yijin Liu, Jiaan Wang, Fandong Meng, Jinan Xu, Yufeng Chen, Jie Zhou


Abstract
Recently, Knowledge Editing has received increasing attention, since it could update the specific knowledge from outdated ones in pretrained models without re-training. However, as pointed out by recent studies, existing related methods tend to merely memorize the superficial word composition of the edited knowledge, rather than truly learning and absorbing it. Consequently, on the reasoning questions, we discover that existing methods struggle to utilize the edited knowledge to reason the new answer, and tend to retain outdated responses, which are generated by the original models utilizing original knowledge. Nevertheless, the outdated responses are unexpected for the correct answers to reasoning questions, which we named as the outdated issue. To alleviate this issue, in this paper, we propose a simple yet effective decoding strategy, i.e., outDated ISsue aware deCOding (DISCO), to enhance the performance of edited models on reasoning questions. Specifically, we capture the difference in the probability distribution between the original and edited models. Further, we amplify the difference of the token prediction in the edited model to alleviate the outdated issue, and thus enhance the model performance w.r.t the edited knowledge. Experimental results suggest that applying DISCO could enhance edited models to reason, e.g., on reasoning questions, DISCO outperforms the prior SOTA method by 12.99 F1 scores, and reduces the ratio of the outdated issue to 5.78% on the zsRE dataset.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.552
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9282–9293
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.552
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zengkui Sun, Yijin Liu, Jiaan Wang, Fandong Meng, Jinan Xu, Yufeng Chen, and Jie Zhou. 2024. Outdated Issue Aware Decoding for Factual Knowledge Editing. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024, pages 9282–9293, Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Outdated Issue Aware Decoding for Factual Knowledge Editing (Sun et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.552.pdf