Papers › What Has Been Enhanced in my Knowledge-Enhanced Language Model?
What Has Been Enhanced in my Knowledge-Enhanced Language Model?
Yifan Hou, Guoji Fu, Mrinmaya Sachan
Pretrained language models (LMs) do not capture factual knowledge very well. This has led to the development of a number of knowledge integration (KI) methods which aim to incorporate external knowledge into pretrained LMs. Even though KI methods show some performance gains over vanilla LMs, the inner-workings of these methods are not well-understood. For instance, it is unclear how and what kind of knowledge is effectively integrated into these models and if such integration may lead to catastrophic forgetting of already learned knowledge. This paper revisits the KI process in these models with an information-theoretic view and shows that KI can be interpreted using a graph convolution operation. We propose a probe model called \textit{Graph Convolution Simulator} (GCS) for interpreting knowledge-enhanced LMs and exposing what kind of knowledge is integrated into these models. We conduct experiments to verify that our GCS can indeed be used to correctly interpret the KI process, and we use it to analyze two well-known knowledge-enhanced LMs: ERNIE and K-Adapter, and find that only a small amount of factual knowledge is integrated in them. We stratify knowledge in terms of various relation types and find that ERNIE and K-Adapter integrate different kinds of knowledge to different extent. Our analysis also shows that simply increasing the size of the KI corpus may not lead to better KI; fundamental advances may be needed.
In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Methods
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections