# An Exploration of Knowledge Editing for Arabic

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09629 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09629/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Locating and Editing Factual Associations in GPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05262/) (2022)
- [Mass-Editing Memory in a Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07229/) (2022)
- [Editing Factual Knowledge in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08164/) (2021)
- [Memory-Based Model Editing at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06520/) (2022)
- [Zero-Shot Relation Extraction via Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04115/) (2017)
- [Editing Large Language Models: Problems, Methods, and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13172/) (2023)
- [Can We Edit Factual Knowledge by In-Context Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12740/) (2023)
- [Learning to Edit: Aligning LLMs with Knowledge Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11905/) (2024)
- [Language Anisotropic Cross-Lingual Model Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12677/) (2022)
- [Arabic natural language processing: An overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.02784/) (2019)
- [Cross-lingual Editing in Multilingual Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10521/) (2024)
- [Multilingual Knowledge Editing with Language-Agnostic Factual Neurons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16416/) (2024)
- [Exploring Alignment in Shared Cross-lingual Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14535/) (2024)
- [BMIKE-53: Investigating Cross-Lingual Knowledge Editing with In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17764/) (2024)
- [MLaKE: Multilingual Knowledge Editing Benchmark for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04990/) (2024)
- [Mass-Editing Memory with Attention in Transformers: A cross-lingual exploration of knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02173/) (2025)
- [MPN: Leveraging Multilingual Patch Neuron for Cross-lingual Model Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03190/) (2024)
- [MQA-KEAL: Multi-hop Question Answering under Knowledge Editing for Arabic Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12257/) (2024)
- [Edit Once, Update Everywhere: A Simple Framework for Cross-Lingual Knowledge Synchronization in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14645/) (2025)
- [Editing Across Languages: A Survey of Multilingual Knowledge Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14393/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While Knowledge Editing (KE) has been widely explored in English, its behavior in morphologically rich languages like Arabic remains underexamined. In this work, we present the first study of Arabic KE. We evaluate four methods (ROME, MEMIT, ICE, and LTE) on Arabic translations of the ZsRE and Counterfact benchmarks, analyzing both multilingual and cross-lingual settings. Our experiments on Llama-2-7B-chat show that parameter-based methods struggle with cross-lingual generalization, while instruction-tuned methods perform more robustly. We extend Learning-To-Edit (LTE) to a multilingual setting and show that joint Arabic-English training improves both editability and transfer. We release Arabic KE benchmarks and multilingual training for LTE data to support future research.