MobiEdit: Resource-efficient Knowledge Editing for Personalized On-device LLMs

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) are deployed on mobile devices to power killer applications such as intelligent assistants. LLMs pre-trained on general corpora often hallucinate when handling personalized or unseen queries, leading to incorrect or outdated responses. Knowledge editing addresses this by identifying and adjusting a small crucial portion of model weights, without compromising the general knowledge. However, prior knowledge editing methods are impractical to run on local devices due to the resource-heavy backpropagation (BP) needed for updates. We present MobiEdit, the first mobile knowledge editing framework that enables efficient LLM personalization on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) mobile devices. MobiEdit replaces full-precision BP with quantized forward-only gradient estimation, thus compatible with the energy-efficient mobile neural processing units (NPUs). To further improve gradient estimation efficiency, we introduce two optimizations: an early stopping mechanism that adaptively terminates editing upon success and prefix activation reusing that reduce redundant computation across steps. Our approach enables real-time editing of 3B-parameter models (Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct and Llama3.2-3B-Instruct) on COTS mobile devices with 7.1$\times$ less memory, 15.8 $\times$ less energy and 3.4$\times$ less latency compared to previous knowledge editing methods.