Model editing has become a promising method for precisely and effectively updating knowledge in language models. In this paper, we investigate knowledge attenuation, in which the retention of updated knowledge within the language model decreases as the number of edits increases after sequential editing. Through empirical study, we discovered that existing editing methods generally suffer from knowledge attenuation. We attribute this phenomenon to two aspects: (1) redundant parameters interference and (2) update weight disentanglement. To this end, we propose the AdaPLE method. It not only mitigates the knowledge attenuation issue but also improves the performance on existing benchmarks. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to investigate the cause and mitigation of knowledge attenuation in sequential LLM editing.

The upscaling of Large Language Models (LLMs) has yielded impressive advances in natural language processing, yet it also poses significant deployment challenges. Weight quantization has emerged as a widely embraced solution to reduce memory and computational demands. This paper introduces BitDistiller, a framework that synergizes Quantization-Aware Training (QAT) with Knowledge Distillation (KD) to boost the performance of LLMs at ultra-low precisions (sub-4-bit). Specifically, BitDistiller first incorporates a tailored asymmetric quantization and clipping technique to maximally preserve the fidelity of quantized weights, and then proposes a novel Confidence-Aware Kullback-Leibler Divergence (CAKLD) objective, which is employed in a self-distillation manner to enable faster convergence and superior model performance. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that BitDistiller significantly surpasses existing methods in both 3-bit and 2-bit configurations on general language understanding and complex reasoning benchmarks. Notably, BitDistiller is shown to be more cost-effective, demanding fewer data and training resources. The code is available at https://github.com/DD-DuDa/BitDistiller.