A Survey on Knowledge Editing of Neural Networks

TL;DR

This survey reviews recent methods for efficiently editing neural networks' knowledge to correct errors or update information without retraining, addressing challenges like catastrophic forgetting and model stability.

Contribution

It formalizes the problem of neural network knowledge editing, categorizes existing approaches, and discusses future research directions in this emerging field.

Findings

Identifies four main families of knowledge editing methods.

Highlights datasets and benchmarks used in the field.

Discusses intersections with related AI research areas.

Abstract

Deep neural networks are becoming increasingly pervasive in academia and industry, matching and surpassing human performance on a wide variety of fields and related tasks. However, just as humans, even the largest artificial neural networks make mistakes, and once-correct predictions can become invalid as the world progresses in time. Augmenting datasets with samples that account for mistakes or up-to-date information has become a common workaround in practical applications. However, the well-known phenomenon of catastrophic forgetting poses a challenge in achieving precise changes in the implicitly memorized knowledge of neural network parameters, often requiring a full model re-training to achieve desired behaviors. That is expensive, unreliable, and incompatible with the current trend of large self-supervised pre-training, making it necessary to find more efficient and effective methods for adapting neural network models to changing data. To address this need, knowledge editing is emerging as a novel area of research that aims to enable reliable, data-efficient, and fast changes to a pre-trained target model, without affecting model behaviors on previously learned tasks. In this survey, we provide a brief review of this recent artificial intelligence field of research. We first introduce the problem of editing neural networks, formalize it in a common framework and differentiate it from more notorious branches of research such as continuous learning. Next, we provide a review of the most relevant knowledge editing approaches and datasets proposed so far, grouping works under four different families: regularization techniques, meta-learning, direct model editing, and architectural strategies. Finally, we outline some intersections with other fields of research and potential directions for future works.