From Fact Overwriting to Knowledge Evolution: Causal Editing via On-Policy Self-Distillation

While Knowledge Editing (KE) enables efficient updates, its dominant Static Fact Overwriting paradigm treats LLMs as discrete databases, forcibly injecting isolated facts. Fracturing pre-trained logical topologies, this triggers Epistemic Dissonance -- a pathology where un-evolved legacy priors force the model to explicitly negate the injected update. Idealized interventions reveal that this is an inherent structural flaw rather than mere algorithmic noise, with a zero-distortion proxy yielding a catastrophic 95.6% self-refutation rate. Given the causally driven nature of real-world knowledge, grounding updates in explicit causal narratives effectively collapses this conflict rate to just 6.6%, underscoring the imperative for a paradigm shift toward Causal Editing. To internalize this evolution, we propose CODE (Causal On-policy Distillation for Editing). By coupling causal bootstrapping with asymmetric on-policy distillation, CODE engraves causal transition logic directly into parametric memory. Experiments on LLaMA-3.1 and Qwen-2.5 show CODE drastically suppresses self-refutation to 1.8% while securing robust multi-hop accuracy (up to 83.5%), seamlessly transforming discrete fact injection into coherent knowledge evolution. Code is available at https://github.com/CrashBugger/CODE.

Knowledge Visualization: A Benchmark and Method for Knowledge-Intensive Text-to-Image Generation

Recent text-to-image (T2I) models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in photorealistic synthesis and instruction following. However, their reliability in knowledge-intensive settings remains largely unexplored. Unlike natural image generation, knowledge visualization requires not only semantic alignment but also strict adherence to domain knowledge, structural constraints, and symbolic conventions, exposing a critical gap between visual plausibility and scientific correctness. To systematically study this problem, we introduce KVBench, a curriculum-grounded benchmark for evaluating knowledge-intensive T2I generation. KVBench covers six senior high-school subjects: Biology, Chemistry, Geography, History, Mathematics, and Physics. The benchmark consists of 1,800 expert-curated prompts derived from over 30 authoritative textbooks. Using this benchmark, we evaluate 14 state-of-the-art open- and closed-source models, revealing substantial deficiencies in logical reasoning, symbolic precision, and multilingual robustness, with open-source models consistently underperforming proprietary systems. To address these limitations, we further propose KE-Check, a two-stage framework that improves scientific fidelity via (1) Knowledge Elaboration for structured prompt enrichment, and (2) Checklist-Guided Refinement for explicit constraint enforcement through violation identification and constraint-guided editing. KE-Check effectively mitigates scientific hallucinations, narrowing the performance gap between open-source and leading closed-source models. Data and codes are publicly available at https://github.com/zhaoran66/KVBench.

AOP-Smart: A RAG-Enhanced Large Language Model Framework for Adverse Outcome Pathway Analysis

Adverse Outcome Pathways (AOPs) are an important knowledge framework in toxicological research and risk assessment. In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have gradually been applied to AOP-related question answering and mechanistic reasoning tasks. However, due to the existence of the hallucination problem, that is, the model may generate content that is inconsistent with facts or lacks evidence, their reliability is still limited. To address this issue, this study proposes an AOP-oriented Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework, AOP-Smart. Based on the official XML data from AOP-Wiki, this method uses Key Events (KEs), Key Event Relationships (KERs), and specific AOP information to retrieve relevant knowledge for user questions, thereby improving the reliability of the generated results of large language models. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, this study constructed a test set containing 20 AOP-related question answering tasks, covering KE identification, upstream and downstream KE retrieval, and complex AOP retrieval tasks. Experiments were conducted on three mainstream large language models, Gemini, DeepSeek, and ChatGPT, and comparative tests were performed under two settings: without RAG and with RAG. The experimental results show that, without using RAG, the accuracies of GPT, DeepSeek, and Gemini were 15.0\%, 35.0\%, and 20.0\%, respectively; after using RAG, their accuracies increased to 95.0\%, 100.0\%, and 95.0\%, respectively. The results indicate that AOP-Smart can significantly alleviate the hallucination problem of large language models in AOP knowledge tasks, and greatly improve the accuracy and consistency of their answers.

MedConcept: Unsupervised Concept Discovery for Interpretability in Medical VLMs

While medical Vision-Language models (VLMs) achieve strong performance on tasks such as tumor or organ segmentation and diagnosis prediction, their opaque latent representations limit clinical trust and the ability to explain predictions. Interpretability of these multimodal representations are therefore essential for the trustworthy clinical deployment of pretrained medical VLMs. However, current interpretability methods, such as gradient- or attention-based visualizations, are often limited to specific tasks such as classification. Moreover, they do not provide concept-level explanations derived from shared pretrained representations that can be reused across downstream tasks. We introduce MedConcept, a framework that uncovers latent medical concepts in a fully unsupervised manner and grounds them in clinically verifiable textual semantics. MedConcept identifies sparse neuron-level concept activations from pretrained VLM representations and translates them into pseudo-report-style summaries, enabling physician-level inspection of internal model reasoning. To address the lack of quantitative evaluation in concept-based interpretability, we introduce a quantitative semantic verification protocol that leverages an independent pretrained medical LLM as a frozen external evaluator to assess concept alignment with radiology reports. We define three concept scores, Aligned, Unaligned, and Uncertain, to quantify semantic support, contradiction, or ambiguity relative to radiology reports and use them exclusively for post hoc evaluation. These scores provide a quantitative baseline for assessing interpretability in medical VLMs. All codes, prompt and data to be released on acceptance. Ke

AfriVoices-KE: A Multilingual Speech Dataset for Kenyan Languages

AfriVoices-KE is a large-scale multilingual speech dataset comprising approximately 3,000 hours of audio across five Kenyan languages: Dholuo, Kikuyu, Kalenjin, Maasai, and Somali. The dataset includes 750 hours of scripted speech and 2,250 hours of spontaneous speech, collected from 4,777 native speakers across diverse regions and demographics. This work addresses the critical underrepresentation of African languages in speech technology by providing a high-quality, linguistically diverse resource. Data collection followed a dual methodology: scripted recordings drew from compiled text corpora, translations, and domain-specific generated sentences spanning eleven domains relevant to the Kenyan context, while unscripted speech was elicited through textual and image prompts to capture natural linguistic variation and dialectal nuances. A customized mobile application enabled contributors to record using smartphones. Quality assurance operated at multiple layers, encompassing automated signal-to-noise ratio validation prior to recording and human review for content accuracy. Though the project encountered challenges common to low-resource settings, including unreliable infrastructure, device compatibility issues, and community trust barriers, these were mitigated through local mobilizers, stakeholder partnerships, and adaptive training protocols. AfriVoices-KE provides a foundational resource for developing inclusive automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech systems, while advancing the digital preservation of Kenya's linguistic heritage.

Semi-Automated Knowledge Engineering and Process Mapping for Total Airport Management

Documentation of airport operations is inherently complex due to extensive technical terminology, rigorous regulations, proprietary regional information, and fragmented communication across multiple stakeholders. The resulting data silos and semantic inconsistencies present a significant impediment to the Total Airport Management (TAM) initiative. This paper presents a methodological framework for constructing a domain-grounded, machine-readable Knowledge Graph (KG) through a dual-stage fusion of symbolic Knowledge Engineering (KE) and generative Large Language Models (LLMs). The framework employs a scaffolded fusion strategy in which expert-curated KE structures guide LLM prompts to facilitate the discovery of semantically aligned knowledge triples. We evaluate this methodology on the Google LangExtract library and investigate the impact of context window utilization by comparing localized segment-based inference with document-level processing. Contrary to prior empirical observations of long-context degradation in LLMs, document-level processing improves the recovery of non-linear procedural dependencies. To ensure the high-fidelity provenance required in airport operations, the proposed framework fuses a probabilistic model for discovery and a deterministic algorithm for anchoring every extraction to its ground source. This ensures absolute traceability and verifiability, bridging the gap between "black-box" generative outputs and the transparency required for operational tooling. Finally, we introduce an automated framework that operationalizes this pipeline to synthesize complex operational workflows from unstructured textual corpora.

The Anatomy of an Edit: Mechanism-Guided Activation Steering for Knowledge Editing

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as knowledge bases, but keeping them up to date requires targeted knowledge editing (KE). However, it remains unclear how edits are implemented inside the model once applied. In this work, we take a mechanistic view of KE using neuron-level knowledge attribution (NLKA). Unlike prior work that focuses on pre-edit causal tracing and localization, we use post-edit attribution -- contrasting successful and failed edits -- to isolate the computations that shift when an edit succeeds. Across representative KE methods, we find a consistent pattern: mid-to-late attention predominantly promotes the new target, while attention and FFN modules cooperate to suppress the original fact. Motivated by these findings, we propose MEGA, a MEchanism-Guided Activation steering method that performs attention-residual interventions in attribution-aligned regions without modifying model weights. On CounterFact and Popular, MEGA achieves strong editing performance across KE metrics on GPT2-XL and LLaMA2-7B. Overall, our results elevate post-edit attribution from analysis to engineering signal: by pinpointing where and how edits take hold, it powers MEGA to deliver reliable, architecture-agnostic knowledge edits.

MetaKE: Meta-learning Aligned Knowledge Editing via Bi-level Optimization

Knowledge editing (KE) aims to precisely rectify specific knowledge in Large Language Models (LLMs) without disrupting general capabilities. State-of-the-art methods suffer from an open-loop control mismatch. We identify a critical "Semantic-Execution Disconnect": the semantic target is derived independently without feedback from the downstream's feasible region. This misalignment often causes valid semantic targets to fall within the prohibited space, resulting in gradient truncation and editing failure. To bridge this gap, we propose MetaKE (Meta-learning Aligned Knowledge Editing), a new framework that reframes KE as a bi-level optimization problem. Departing from static calculation, MetaKE treats the edit target as a learnable meta-parameter: the upper-level optimizer seeks a feasible target to maximize post-edit performance, while the lower-level solver executes the editing. To address the challenge of differentiating through complex solvers, we derive a Structural Gradient Proxy, which explicitly backpropagates editability constraints to the target learning phase. Theoretical analysis demonstrates that MetaKE automatically aligns the edit direction with the model's feasible manifold. Extensive experiments confirm that MetaKE significantly outperforms strong baselines, offering a new perspective on knowledge editing.

MMKU-Bench: A Multimodal Update Benchmark for Diverse Visual Knowledge

As real-world knowledge continues to evolve, the parametric knowledge acquired by multimodal models during pretraining becomes increasingly difficult to remain consistent with real-world knowledge. Existing research on multimodal knowledge updating focuses only on learning previously unknown knowledge, while overlooking the need to update knowledge that the model has already mastered but that later changes; moreover, evaluation is limited to the same modality, lacking a systematic analysis of cross-modal consistency. To address these issues, this paper proposes MMKU-Bench, a comprehensive evaluation benchmark for multimodal knowledge updating, which contains over 25k knowledge instances and more than 49k images, covering two scenarios, updated knowledge and unknown knowledge, thereby enabling comparative analysis of learning across different knowledge types. On this benchmark, we evaluate a variety of representative approaches, including supervised fine-tuning (SFT), reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), and knowledge editing (KE). Experimental results show that SFT and RLHF are prone to catastrophic forgetting, while KE better preserve general capabilities but exhibit clear limitations in continual updating. Overall, MMKU-Bench provides a reliable and comprehensive evaluation benchmark for multimodal knowledge updating, advancing progress in this field.

Probing neural audio codecs for distinctions among English nuclear tunes

State-of-the-art spoken dialogue models (Défossez et al. 2024; Schalkwyk et al. 2025) use neural audio codecs to "tokenize" audio signals into a lower-frequency stream of vectorial latent representations, each quantized using a hierarchy of vector codebooks. A transformer layer allows these representations to reflect some time- and context-dependent patterns. We train probes on labeled audio data from Cole et al. (2023) to test whether the pitch trajectories that characterize English phrase-final (nuclear) intonational tunes are among these patterns. Results: Linear probes trained on the unquantized latents or some of the associated codewords yield above-chance accuracy in distinguishing eight phonologically specified nuclear tunes with monotonal pitch accents (top average test accuracy (TATA): 0.31) and the five clusters of these tunes that are robust in human speech production and perception (TATA: 0.45). Greater accuracy (TATAs: 0.74-0.89) is attained for binary distinctions between classes of rising vs. falling tunes, respectively used for questions and assertions. Information about tunes is spread among all codebooks, which calls into question a distinction between 'semantic' and 'acoustic' codebooks found in the literature. Accuracies improve with nonlinear probes, but discrimination among the five clusters remains far from human performance, suggesting a fundamental limitation of current codecs.