# Lifelong Knowledge Editing for Vision Language Models with Low-Rank Mixture-of-Experts

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.15432 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15432/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Image editing and quality assessment, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 61 of its 74 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Nov 2024.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Image editing and quality assessment](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/image-editing-and-quality-assessment/)
- Mixture-of-experts / [Multimodal MoE models](https://mlsanity.com/moe/multimodal-moe-models/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 61)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01068/) (2022)
- [Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.06538/) (2017)
- [Switch Transformers: Scaling to Trillion Parameter Models with Simple and Efficient Sparsity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03961/) (2021)
- [InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06500/) (2023)
- [MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10592/) (2023)
- [Locating and Editing Factual Associations in GPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05262/) (2022)
- [Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00837/) (2016)
- [MMBench: Is Your Multi-modal Model an All-around Player?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06281/) (2023)
- [GShard: Scaling Giant Models with Conditional Computation and Automatic Sharding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16668/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO Captions: Data Collection and Evaluation Server](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.00325/) (2015)
- [A Survey on Evaluation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03109/) (2023)
- [OK-VQA: A Visual Question Answering Benchmark Requiring External Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00067/) (2019)
- [GLM: General Language Model Pretraining with Autoregressive Blank Infilling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10360/) (2021)
- [Mass-Editing Memory in a Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07229/) (2022)
- [GLM-130B: An Open Bilingual Pre-trained Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02414/) (2022)
- [Mixture-of-Experts with Expert Choice Routing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.09368/) (2022)
- [Interpretable Explanations of Black Boxes by Meaningful Perturbation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03296/) (2017)
- [Knowledge Neurons in Pretrained Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08696/) (2021)
- [Editing Factual Knowledge in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08164/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [When Large Multimodal Models Confront Evolving Knowledge: Challenges and Explorations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24449/) (2025)
- [R^2MoE: Redundancy-Removal Mixture of Experts for Lifelong Concept Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13107/) (2025)
- [Towards Meta-Cognitive Knowledge Editing for Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.05714/) (2025)
- [DSCA: Dynamic Subspace Concept Alignment for Lifelong VLM Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.07965/) (2026)
- [Modality-Decoupled Online Recursive Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.20273/) (2026)
- [Uncovering and Mitigating Transient Blindness in Multimodal Model Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.13243/) (2025)
- [R2R: A Route-to-Rerank Post-Training Framework for Multi-Domain Decoder-Only Rerankers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19987/) (2025)
- [What really matters for person re-identification? A Mixture-of-Experts Framework for Semantic Attribute Importance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.08697/) (2025)
- [ReasonEdit: Editing Vision-Language Models using Human Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02408/) (2026)
- [V-DyKnow: A Dynamic Benchmark for Time-Sensitive Knowledge in Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16581/) (2026)
- [Powerful Teachers Matter: Text-Guided Multi-view Knowledge Distillation with Visual Prior Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.24208/) (2026)
- [Tackling Multimodal Learning Challenges with Mixture-of-Expert: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.27431/) (2026)
- [When the Same Musical Knowledge Forgets Differently: A Clean Probe of Pathway-Dependent Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15088/) (2026)
- [Multimodal Knowledge Edit-Scoped Generalization for Online Recursive MLLM Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.01978/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Model editing aims to correct inaccurate knowledge, update outdated information, and incorporate new data into Large Language Models (LLMs) without the need for retraining. This task poses challenges in lifelong scenarios where edits must be continuously applied for real-world applications. While some editors demonstrate strong robustness for lifelong editing in pure LLMs, Vision LLMs (VLLMs), which incorporate an additional vision modality, are not directly adaptable to existing LLM editors. In this paper, we propose LiveEdit, a LIfelong Vision language modEl Edit to bridge the gap between lifelong LLM editing and VLLMs. We begin by training an editing expert generator to independently produce low-rank experts for each editing instance, with the goal of correcting the relevant responses of the VLLM. A hard filtering mechanism is developed to utilize visual semantic knowledge, thereby coarsely eliminating visually irrelevant experts for input queries during the inference stage of the post-edited model. Finally, to integrate visually relevant experts, we introduce a soft routing mechanism based on textual semantic relevance to achieve multi-expert fusion. For evaluation, we establish a benchmark for lifelong VLLM editing. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LiveEdit offers significant advantages in lifelong VLLM editing scenarios. Further experiments validate the rationality and effectiveness of each module design in LiveEdit.
