Learning to Edit Knowledge via Instruction-based Chain-of-Thought Prompting
Jinhu Fu, Yan Bai Peking University, Tsinghua University, Longzhu He Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Yihang Lou Huawei Technologies Ltd., Yanxiao Zhao, Li Sun Beijing University of Post and Telecommunications, Sen Su Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications
原文摘要
Large language models (LLMs) can effectively handle outdated information through knowledge editing. However, current approaches face two key limitations: (I) Poor generalization: Most approaches rigidly inject new knowledge without ensuring that the model can use it effectively to solve practical problems. (II) Narrow scope: Current methods focus primarily on structured fact triples, overlooking the diverse unstructured forms of factual information (e.g., news, articles) prevalent in real-world contexts. To address these challenges, we propose a new paradigm: teaching LLMs to edit knowledge via Chain of Thoughts (CoTs) reasoning (CoT2Edit). We first leverage language model agents for both structured and unstructured edited data to generate CoTs, building high-quality instruction data. The model is then trained to reason over edited knowledge through supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). At inference time, we integrate Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to dynamically retrieve relevant edited facts for real-time knowledge editing. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves strong generalization across six diverse knowledge editing scenarios with just a single round of training on three open-source language models.
cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表