Editing a knowledge graph embedding (KGE) model to promote a desired answer can displace correct answers from the returned list. Locality tests based only on facts that reuse the edited parameter can miss this ranking effect. We introduce a common rank-displacement audit at three scopes: facts supported by the edited parameter, other correct answers to the target query, and correct answers across queries with the same relation. We also derive dimensional and geometric conditions for an update to improve the target while exactly preserving selected scores. On FB15k-237 with DistMult and ComplEx, direct promotion always moves the target into the top ten, but does so without damage in only 23.0--23.2% of edits. Strict preservation causes no measured damage, yet succeeds in only 1.3--1.4%. Support-regularized entity editing gives the highest joint success, 36.3--37.7%, while rank-truncated preservation reaches 32.8--34.7% and reduces the mean number of displaced answers from about 14 to 1.2. Experiments across dimensions, scorers, ranking conventions, and a learned editor show that locality depends on both the protected scope and the editing mechanism. KGE editing should therefore report correction success together with the incidence and severity of rank displacement.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world applications that require access to up-to-date knowledge. However, retraining LLMs is computationally expensive. Therefore, knowledge editing techniques are crucial for maintaining current information and correcting erroneous assertions within pre-trained models. Current benchmarks for knowledge editing primarily focus on recalling edited facts, often neglecting their logical consequences. To address this limitation, we introduce a new benchmark designed to evaluate how knowledge editing methods handle the logical consequences of a single fact edit. Our benchmark extracts relevant logical rules from a knowledge graph for a given edit. Then, it generates multi-hop questions based on these rules to assess the impact on logical consequences. Our findings indicate that while existing knowledge editing approaches can accurately insert direct assertions into LLMs, they frequently fail to inject entailed knowledge. Specifically, experiments with popular methods like ROME and FT reveal a substantial performance gap, up to 24%, between evaluations on directly edited knowledge and on entailed knowledge. This highlights the critical need for semantics-aware evaluation frameworks in knowledge editing.
Tatiana Moteu Ngoli, NDah Jean Kouagou, Hamada M. Zahera +1
Knowledge Editing (KE) has emerged as a frontier for updating specific facts in LLMs without costly retraining, but its reliability and underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. In this work, we examine KE from an adversarial elicitation perspective, revealing that edited knowledge is often not fully erased and continues to surface, with consistent failures observed across diverse model architectures. To explain this behavior, we conduct a mechanistic analysis of popular KE methods. We show that low-rank updates do not overwrite existing knowledge but instead redistribute it within the model's representation space. Furthermore, we find that these methods act as targeted suppression mechanisms that reduce the likelihood of expressing original facts, rather than removing them from the model. Analysis of the loss landscape reveals that edited knowledge lies in narrow, anisotropic regions that are highly sensitive to perturbations, making them highly vulnerable to indirect prompting and adversarial attacks. By exposing these profound architectural vulnerabilities, our work proves that KE algorithms are inherently bypassable and motivates a fundamental reevaluation of how we deploy post-hoc updates in several LLM applications.
Single-edit updates in large language models can trigger ripple effects across local knowledge neighborhoods: desirable propagation to related facts and unintended perturbation of preserved ones. Existing methods address these two effects separately, without explicitly modeling their coupling. We challenge this separation through an analysis of ripple responses across typical baselines, identifying two coupled design pressures: editable-side coordination and preserved-side leakage. We propose Joint Neighborhood Optimization (JNO), a new knowledge-editing framework to formalize and jointly address both pressures at the target-planning stage. JNO instantiates this principle through Pressure-Aware Coordination (PAC), which jointly optimizes neighborhood target representations under coupled constraints, and a semantic pre-execution gate that rejects high-risk target plans before parameter execution. Experiments on RippleEdits show JNO improves propagation and preservation metrics by at least 7.0% while preserving cross-backbone editing stability.