Tejal Nair
Author directory2026
Towards Reliable, Generalizable, and Specific In-Context Knowledge Editing via Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning
Xuzhong Wang | Maiqi Jiang | Tejal Nair | Girija Bhusal | Yanfu Zhang | Haipeng Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Xuzhong Wang | Maiqi Jiang | Tejal Nair | Girija Bhusal | Yanfu Zhang | Haipeng Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful but limited by static parametric knowledge that becomes outdated once pretraining ends. Knowledge editing addresses this problem by updating model behavior on target facts without full retraining. In particular, in-context knowledge editing has gained attention because it is training-free and readily applicable to black-box LLMs. Recent reinforcement learning (RL)-based approaches improve over fixed retrieval strategies by adapting prompt construction to the quantity-quality trade-off. Despite initial success, they fail to model the prompt as a structured entity under the distinct and often competing objectives of reliability, generality, and specificity. Previous methods largely optimize a single objective and make decisions over only part of the prompt construction process, thereby overlooking both the balance of different objectives and the global organization of demonstrations. We propose Multi-Objective In-context Knowledge Editing (MO-IKE), a multi-objective RL algorithm that formulates prompt construction for in-context knowledge editing as a Constrained Markov Decision Process. MO-IKE trains a dynamic retriever to optimize competing objectives in knowledge editing, enabling more balanced and globally coherent prompt construction. On Llama-3.2, MO-IKE improves edit success (reliability) from 85.0% to 92.0%, paraphrase consistency (generality) from 77% to 79%, while increasing retention rate (specificity) by 23.0% compared to prior RL-based methods.
Confidence-Aware Ranker Ensembles for Robust In-Context Knowledge Editing
Tejal Nair | Mahmud Wasif Nafee | Maiqi Jiang | Ashley Gao | Haipeng Chen | Yanfu Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Tejal Nair | Mahmud Wasif Nafee | Maiqi Jiang | Ashley Gao | Haipeng Chen | Yanfu Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Although large language models (LLMs) excel at factual recall, they can still propagate stale or incorrect knowledge, making in-context knowledge editing a gradient-free remedy suitable for black-box APIs. These knowledge editors that use in-context learning typically rely on a single retriever and surface-similarity heuristics to build prompts. However, a key observation in this study is that retrievers can be complementary: semantic rankers may recover paraphrased evidence, while lexical or feature-based retrievers may preserve precise entities and cues. This creates two gaps in single-retriever editors: they (i) miss complementary evidence that different retrievers surface and (ii) cannot adapt when one retriever is clearly more reliable for a query. We introduce a Feature-Weighted Ensemble for In-context Knowledge Editing (FWE-IKE) that calibrates three heterogeneous rankers (LLM-, BERT-, and MLP-based), extracts simple confidence features from each ranker, predicts per-query mixture weights, and applies a conservative margin-based routing gate that selects a single expert when confident; otherwise we mix calibrated distributions with learned per-query weights. On the CounterFact benchmark, FWE-IKE attains 88.33% Edit-Success Rate, a +3.0 point gain over the best single retriever and approaching the oracle upper bound (91%). Case studies, an ablation study, and analyses show the method systematically recovers complementary wins (e.g., BERT-only, LLM-only, MLP-only slices). FWE-IKE improves edit accuracy without touching model weights and provides a practical path to more robust, confidence-aware retrieval for IKE.