Scaling Knowledge Editing in LLMs to 100,000 Facts with Neural KV Database

Abstract

Efficiently editing knowledge stored in Large Language Models (LLMs) enables model updates without large-scale training. One promising solution is Locate-and-Edit (L\&E), allowing simultaneous modifications of a massive number of factual knowledge. However, such editing may compromise the general abilities of LLMs and even result in forgetting edited facts when scaling up to thousands of edits. In this paper, we model existing linear L\&E methods as querying a Key-Value (KV) database. From this perspective, we then propose NeuralDB, an editing framework that explicitly represents the edited facts as a neural KV database equipped with a non-linear gated retrieval module. With simple modification over L\&E methods, our framework not only significantly extends the capacity of knowledge editing but also eliminates the associated side effects. Comprehensive experiments involving the editing of 10,000 facts were conducted on the ZsRE and CounterFact datasets, including GPT2-XL, GPT-J (6B) and Llama-3 (8B). The results demonstrate that NeuralDB excels in all metrics of editing success while maintaining original performance evaluated by six representative text understanding and generation tasks. Further experiments indicate that NeuralDB maintains its effectiveness even when scaled to 100,000 facts (\textbf{50}$\mathbf{\times}$ more than in prior work).