aiqbench analysis
This arXiv preprint argues that the field's standard test for model editing, whether a factual update carries over to reasoning tasks, is theoretically ill-posed and empirically unreliable. It proposes compositional generalization, where an edited fact is combined with the model's reasoning, as an alternative that appears to hold across several models and editing methods. Readers working on knowledge updates in LLMs should treat the claim as a preprint-stage hypothesis, and should check whether the evaluation protocols and deployment observations hold up under closer scrutiny.
Generalizable Model Editing Could Be More Than Direct Generalization
arXiv:2610.15707v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A central desideratum in model editing is generalization to complex tasks, which prior work formalizes under a direct generalization paradigm: treating and evaluating LLM behavior as an input-output mapping and expecting a factual update to alter outputs on reasoning tasks. Yet despite substantial empirical effort, the field consensus remains that such generalization is highly challenging and elusive. However, when we deploy the latest models in an in-the-wild chatbot-user setting, we surprisingly find that even classical editing methods exhibit remarkably fluent generalization behavior. This motivates us to revisit the obstacles to generalization and the limitations of the prevailing paradigm. We find that direct generalization is fundamentally constrained both theoretically and practically: theoretically, it suffers from an identifiability issue; and practically, existing approaches attempting to circumvent this are further hindered by the ambiguity of their constructed biases and by vulnerability to being overridden by other factors such as optimization dynamics. We instead identify compositional generalization, empowered by the increasingly strong reasoning and composition abilities of modern LLMs, as a theoretically grounded and empirically validated alternative. We validate this phenomenon across multiple models and editing methods, showing that such generalization behavior is widespread. Overall, we argue that generalizable model editing could be more than direct generalization, and call for a paradigm shift toward more generalizable and practically deployable knowledge update techniques.
Abstract:A central desideratum in model editing is generalization to complex tasks, which prior work formalizes under a direct generalization paradigm: treating and evaluating LLM behavior as an input-output mapping and expecting a factual update to alter outputs on reasoning tasks. Yet despite substantial empirical effort, the field consensus remains that such generalization is highly challenging and elusive. However, when we deploy the latest models in an in-the-wild chatbot-user setting, we surprisingly find that even classical editing methods exhibit remarkably fluent generalization behavior. This motivates us to revisit the obstacles to generalization and the limitations of the prevailing paradigm. We find that direct generalization is fundamentally constrained both theoretically and practically: theoretically, it suffers from an identifiability issue; and practically, existing approaches attempting to circumvent this are further hindered by the ambiguity of their constructed biases and by vulnerability to being overridden by other factors such as optimization dynamics. We instead identify compositional generalization, empowered by the increasingly strong reasoning and composition abilities of modern LLMs, as a theoretically grounded and empirically validated alternative. We validate this phenomenon across multiple models and editing methods, showing that such generalization behavior is widespread. Overall, we argue that generalizable model editing could be more than direct generalization, and call for a paradigm shift toward more generalizable and practically deployable knowledge update techniques.
Machine Learning (cs.LG); Computation and Language (cs.CL)
arXiv:2610.15707 [cs.LG]
(or arXiv:2610.15707v1 [cs.LG] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.15707 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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Full text under the publisher's open licence · 316 words
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