Organizations: 1Hefei University of Technology, Hefei, China
Abstract
Existing methods in Multimodal Knowledge Editing (MKE) have advanced the ability to correct outdated or inaccurate knowledge in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). However, they exhibit a critical limitation: while effectively modifying target factual pairs, they fail to generalize edits to logically related queries and often cause unintended alterations to unrelated but visually or semantically linked information. We identify and formalize two underlying failure modes causing this issue: Causal Misalignment, which confines edits to the specific sample, and Feature Entanglement, which causes unintended alterations to coupled but irrelevant information. To address these issues, we propose Localized and Disentangled Knowledge Editing (LDKE), a new framework that achieves precise and generalized editing by localizing fact-specific model layers and disentangling target-relevant inputs from irrelevant ones. Our approach introduces a Fast Localization module to identify and update critical layers efficiently, along with a Disentanglement Classifier that routes inputs appropriately to preserve unrelated knowledge. Extensive experiments across various benchmarks and MLLMs demonstrate that LDKE achieves superior performance in propagating edits to related contexts while maintaining high locality.
Although Knowledge Editing provides an efficient mechanism for updating the knowledge of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), we find that current paradigms still suffer from an important yet remain underexplored issue : editing decoupling failure, where entity-related knowledge can be updated when the model is triggered by multimodal inputs (text--image query pairs), however, it often reverts to outdated pre-edit facts when the paired inputs are split into unimodal ones. Our in-depth empirical analysis reveals that the entity knowledge in MLLMs is not stored as a unified representation, but is instead distributed across disentangled modality-specific pathways. As a result, updates biased toward multimodal queries fail to propagate effectively to unimodal circuits. To bridge this gap, we propose DECODE, which explicitly disentangles and localizes modality-specific neuron groups for targeted knowledge. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DECODE consistently achieves effective knowledge updates under different modality triggers, thereby mitigating editing decoupling failures.
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) need efficient mechanisms to update knowledge without degrading existing capabilities. While intrinsic multimodal knowledge editing achieves strong reliability and locality, it often exhibits limited generality, failing to propagate edits across semantically equivalent visual and linguistic variations. This issue arises from the lack of explicit semantic supervision, rigid editing scopes, and biased anchoring to individual samples in high-dimensional multimodal spaces. We address robust intrinsic multimodal knowledge editing by explicitly targeting generalization. We formalize robustness through knowledge units that group semantically equivalent multimodal inputs and define generality as consistent predictions within each unit. To expose fragile semantic regions, we introduce Latent Adversarial Robustification (LAR), which generates adversarial yet semantically coherent variants in the joint latent space. We further propose Rank-Constrained Subspace Learning (RCSL), enforcing low-rank alignment of adversarial representations at the edit layer via a singular value-based objective. Extensive analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of ASAM empirically.
Online multimodal knowledge editing requires injecting a continual stream of visual-textual corrections into multimodal large language models (MLLMs) with bounded overhead and minimal disruption to unrelated behaviors. Existing editors mainly emphasize edit reliability and long-horizon stability, but rarely control the semantic boundary of each edit. Our pilot analyses of post-edit behaviors and internal neuronal activities reveal a scope gap behind reliable edits: instance-level success neither guarantees transfer to valid cross-modal variants nor prevents leakage to unrelated inputs, while edit-related cross-modal responses concentrate in deeper semantic layers. Therefore, we formulate Edit-Scoped Generalization, reframing online MLLM editing from merely correcting an instance to controlling the propagation boundary of each edit. To this end, we propose ScopeEdit, a scope-aware online editor that decomposes each update into a modality-local absorption branch and an evidence-gated shared generalization branch. The local branch supports stable edit absorption, whereas the shared branch enables cross-modal propagation only when visual and textual evidence are sufficiently aligned. Both branches perform scope-separated write geometries in orthogonal low-rank spaces and maintain branch-wise preconditioners via Sherman--Morrison recursions, yielding constant per-edit overhead. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks, long-horizon edit streams, MLLM backbones, real-world VLKEB scenarios, and complex vision-language architectures show that ScopeEdit consistently improves the trade-off between in-scope cross-modal transfer and out-of-scope locality, while preserving edit reliability, stability and online efficiency. Our code is available at https://github.com/lab-klc/ScopeEdit.