Unveiling and Eliminating the Shortcut Learning for Locate-Then-Edit Knowledge Editing via Both Subject and Relation Awareness

Knowledge editing aims to alternate the target knowledge predicted by large language models while ensuring the least side effects on unrelated knowledge. An effective way to achieve knowledge editing is to identify pivotal parameters for predicting factual associations and modify them with an optimization process to update the predictions. However, these locate-then-edit methods are uncontrollable since they tend to modify most unrelated relations connected to the subject of target editing. We unveil that this failure of controllable editing is due to a shortcut learning issue during the optimization process. Specifically, we discover two crucial features that are the subject feature and the relation feature for models to learn during optimization, but the current optimization process tends to over-learning the subject feature while neglecting the relation feature. To eliminate this shortcut learning of the subject feature, we propose a novel two-stage optimization process that balances the learning of the subject feature and the relation feature. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach successfully prevents knowledge editing from shortcut learning and achieves the optimal overall performance, contributing to controllable knowledge editing.

Relation Also Knows: Rethinking the Recall and Editing of Factual Associations in Auto-Regressive Transformer Language Models

The storage and recall of factual associations in auto-regressive transformer language models (LMs) have drawn a great deal of attention, inspiring knowledge editing by directly modifying the located model weights. Most editing works achieve knowledge editing under the guidance of existing interpretations of knowledge recall that mainly focus on subject knowledge. However, these interpretations are seriously flawed, neglecting relation information and leading to the over-generalizing problem for editing. In this work, we discover a novel relation-focused perspective to interpret the knowledge recall of transformer LMs during inference and apply it on knowledge editing to avoid over-generalizing. Experimental results on the dataset supplemented with a new R-Specificity criterion demonstrate that our editing approach significantly alleviates over-generalizing while remaining competitive on other criteria, breaking the domination of subject-focused editing for future research.

COST-EFF: Collaborative Optimization of Spatial and Temporal Efficiency with Slenderized Multi-exit Language Models

Transformer-based pre-trained language models (PLMs) mostly suffer from excessive overhead despite their advanced capacity. For resource-constrained devices, there is an urgent need for a spatially and temporally efficient model which retains the major capacity of PLMs. However, existing statically compressed models are unaware of the diverse complexities between input instances, potentially resulting in redundancy and inadequacy for simple and complex inputs. Also, miniature models with early exiting encounter challenges in the trade-off between making predictions and serving the deeper layers. Motivated by such considerations, we propose a collaborative optimization for PLMs that integrates static model compression and dynamic inference acceleration. Specifically, the PLM is slenderized in width while the depth remains intact, complementing layer-wise early exiting to speed up inference dynamically. To address the trade-off of early exiting, we propose a joint training approach that calibrates slenderization and preserves contributive structures to each exit instead of only the final layer. Experiments are conducted on GLUE benchmark and the results verify the Pareto optimality of our approach at high compression and acceleration rate with 1/8 parameters and 1/19 FLOPs of BERT.