Enabling artificial intelligence systems, particularly large language models, to update knowledge and flexibly apply it during reasoning remains a central challenge. Existing knowledge editing approaches emphasize atomic facts, improving factual recall but often failing to integrate updated information into a coherent framework usable across contexts. In this work, we argue that knowledge update is fundamentally a reasoning problem rather than a memorization problem. Consequently, a model should be trained in situations where the new information is instrumental to solving a task, combined with pre-existing knowledge, and exercised through multi-step reasoning. Based on this insight, we propose a training strategy based on three principles. First, new knowledge is introduced as a coherent background story that contextualizes novel facts and explains their relation to existing knowledge. Second, models are trained using self-generated multi-hop questions that require multi-step reasoning involving the new information. Third, training is done using knowledge distillation, forcing a student model to internalize the teacher’s reasoning behavior without access to the novel information. Experiments show that models trained with this strategy effectively leverage newly acquired knowledge during reasoning and achieve remarkable performance on challenging questions that require combining multiple new facts.

Adverse drug events (ADEs) are an important aspect of drug safety. Various texts such as biomedical literature, drug reviews, and user posts on social media and medical forums contain a wealth of information about ADEs. Recent studies have applied word embedding and deep learning-based natural language processing to automate ADE detection from text. However, they did not explore incorporating explicit medical knowledge about drugs and adverse reactions or the corresponding feature learning. This paper adopts the heterogeneous text graph, which describes relationships between documents, words, and concepts, augments it with medical knowledge from the Unified Medical Language System, and proposes a concept-aware attention mechanism that learns features differently for the different types of nodes in the graph. We further utilize contextualized embeddings from pretrained language models and convolutional graph neural networks for effective feature representation and relational learning. Experiments on four public datasets show that our model performs competitively to the recent advances, and the concept-aware attention consistently outperforms other attention mechanisms.