@inproceedings{huang-etal-2026-prism,
title = "{PRISM} Edit: One Vector for All Temporal Answers",
author = "Huang, Chen and
Zheng, Qi and
Zhengruiqin and
Zeng, Long and
Xu, Yuantong",
editor = "Lee, Hung-Yi and
Dev, Sunipa and
Li, Jessy and
Elliott, Desmond",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
month = oct,
year = "2026",
address = "Budapest, Hungary",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1719/",
pages = "39217--39235",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-459-0",
abstract = "Model editing keeps large language models (LLMs) up to date without retraining, but temporal facts expose a limitation of the prevailing locate-and-edit paradigm: an update is not always a replacement. When a fact changes, the new answer should become current while the old answer may remain correct in historical time contexts. Building on this insight, we use causal tracing to show that LLMs already support this distinction via a two-stage internal computation: early MLP layers retrieve a time-agnostic subject representation, and later layers modulate it with temporal context to yield the time-correct answer. Motivated by this finding, we introduce PRISM Edit, which optimizes a single polysemous representation across temporal contexts and leverages the model{'}s inherent modulation pathway to route it to temporally correct predictions without requiring any architectural modification. We evaluate on TimeConflict, a newly introduced temporal editing benchmark, and on temporally augmented CounterFact. PRISM Edit improves multiple core metrics over the best baseline, most notably +23.3 Temporal Consistency (TC) and +33.7 Current Relative-time Score (CRS) on LLaMA-3, while being more than 2{\texttimes} faster. Code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/CheerCHuang/PRISM-Edit."
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<abstract>Model editing keeps large language models (LLMs) up to date without retraining, but temporal facts expose a limitation of the prevailing locate-and-edit paradigm: an update is not always a replacement. When a fact changes, the new answer should become current while the old answer may remain correct in historical time contexts. Building on this insight, we use causal tracing to show that LLMs already support this distinction via a two-stage internal computation: early MLP layers retrieve a time-agnostic subject representation, and later layers modulate it with temporal context to yield the time-correct answer. Motivated by this finding, we introduce PRISM Edit, which optimizes a single polysemous representation across temporal contexts and leverages the model’s inherent modulation pathway to route it to temporally correct predictions without requiring any architectural modification. We evaluate on TimeConflict, a newly introduced temporal editing benchmark, and on temporally augmented CounterFact. PRISM Edit improves multiple core metrics over the best baseline, most notably +23.3 Temporal Consistency (TC) and +33.7 Current Relative-time Score (CRS) on LLaMA-3, while being more than 2× faster. Code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/CheerCHuang/PRISM-Edit.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T PRISM Edit: One Vector for All Temporal Answers
%A Huang, Chen
%A Zheng, Qi
%A Zeng, Long
%A Xu, Yuantong
%Y Lee, Hung-Yi
%Y Dev, Sunipa
%Y Li, Jessy
%Y Elliott, Desmond
%A Zhengruiqin
%S Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
%D 2026
%8 October
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Budapest, Hungary
%@ 979-8-89176-459-0
%F huang-etal-2026-prism
%X Model editing keeps large language models (LLMs) up to date without retraining, but temporal facts expose a limitation of the prevailing locate-and-edit paradigm: an update is not always a replacement. When a fact changes, the new answer should become current while the old answer may remain correct in historical time contexts. Building on this insight, we use causal tracing to show that LLMs already support this distinction via a two-stage internal computation: early MLP layers retrieve a time-agnostic subject representation, and later layers modulate it with temporal context to yield the time-correct answer. Motivated by this finding, we introduce PRISM Edit, which optimizes a single polysemous representation across temporal contexts and leverages the model’s inherent modulation pathway to route it to temporally correct predictions without requiring any architectural modification. We evaluate on TimeConflict, a newly introduced temporal editing benchmark, and on temporally augmented CounterFact. PRISM Edit improves multiple core metrics over the best baseline, most notably +23.3 Temporal Consistency (TC) and +33.7 Current Relative-time Score (CRS) on LLaMA-3, while being more than 2× faster. Code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/CheerCHuang/PRISM-Edit.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1719/
%P 39217-39235
Markdown (Informal)
[PRISM Edit: One Vector for All Temporal Answers](https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1719/) (Huang et al., EMNLP 2026)
ACL
- Chen Huang, Qi Zheng, Zhengruiqin, Long Zeng, and Yuantong Xu. 2026. PRISM Edit: One Vector for All Temporal Answers. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 39217–39235, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.