Papers › Propagating Knowledge Updates to LMs Through Distillation

Propagating Knowledge Updates to LMs Through Distillation

15 Jun 2023NeurIPS 2023 11arXiv:2306.09306archive 2025-07-28

Shankar Padmanabhan, Yasumasa Onoe, Michael J. Q. Zhang, Greg Durrett, Eunsol Choi

Modern language models have the capacity to store and use immense amounts of knowledge about real-world entities, but it remains unclear how to update such knowledge stored in model parameters. While prior methods for updating knowledge in LMs successfully inject atomic facts, updated LMs fail to make inferences based on injected facts. In this work, we demonstrate that a context distillation-based approach can both impart knowledge about entities and propagate that knowledge to enable broader inferences. Our approach consists of two stages: transfer set generation and distillation on the transfer set. We first generate a transfer set by prompting a language model to generate continuations from the entity definition. Then, we update the model parameters so that the distribution of the LM (the student) matches the distribution of the LM conditioned on the definition (the teacher) on the transfer set. Our experiments demonstrate that this approach is more effective at propagating knowledge updates than fine-tuning and other gradient-based knowledge-editing methods. Moreover, it does not compromise performance in other contexts, even when injecting the definitions of up to 150 entities at once.

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