CLaRE-ty Amid Chaos: Quantifying Representational Entanglement to Predict Ripple Effects in LLM Editing

Abstract:The static knowledge representations of large language models (LLMs) inevitably become outdated or incorrect over time. While model-editing techniques offer a promising solution by modifying a model's factual associations, they often produce unpredictable ripple effects, which are unintended behavioral changes that propagate even to the hidden space. In this work, we introduce CLaRE, a lightweight representation-level technique to identify where these ripple effects may occur. Unlike prior gradient-based methods, CLaRE quantifies entanglement between facts using forward activations from a single intermediate layer, avoiding costly backward passes. To enable systematic study, we prepare and analyse a corpus of 11,427 facts drawn from three existing datasets. Using CLaRE, we compute large-scale entanglement graphs of this corpus for multiple models, capturing how local edits propagate through representational space. These graphs enable stronger preservation sets for model editing, audit trails, efficient red-teaming, and scalable post-edit evaluation. In comparison to baselines, CLaRE achieves an average of 62.2% improvement in Spearman correlation with ripple effects while being 2.7x faster, and using 2.85x less peak GPU memory. Besides, CLaRE requires only a fraction of the storage needed by the baselines to compute and preserve fact representations. Our entanglement graphs and corpus are available at this https URL.

Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2603.19297 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2603.19297v3 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.19297 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2026.findings-acl.1469 Focus to learn more DOI(s) linking to related resources

arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.

Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.