# CLM-Bench: Benchmarking and Analyzing Cross-lingual Misalignment of LLMs in Knowledge Editing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.17397 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.17397/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Locating and Editing Factual Associations in GPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05262/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Evaluation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03109/) (2023)
- [Mass-Editing Memory in a Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07229/) (2022)
- [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)
- [AlphaEdit: Null-Space Constrained Knowledge Editing for Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02355/) (2024)
- [PMET: Precise Model Editing in a Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08742/) (2023)
- [Model Editing at Scale leads to Gradual and Catastrophic Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.07453/) (2024)
- [Probing the Emergence of Cross-lingual Alignment during LLM Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13229/) (2024)
- [Is Translation All You Need? A Study on Solving Multilingual Tasks with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10258/) (2024)
- [Cross-lingual Editing in Multilingual Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10521/) (2024)
- [Cross-Lingual Auto Evaluation for Assessing Multilingual LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13394/) (2024)
- [mEdIT: Multilingual Text Editing via Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16472/) (2024)
- [Editing Across Languages: A Survey of Multilingual Knowledge Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14393/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Knowledge Editing (KE) has emerged as a promising paradigm for updating facts in Large Language Models (LLMs) without retraining. However, progress in Multilingual Knowledge Editing (MKE) is currently hindered by biased evaluation frameworks. We observe that existing MKE benchmarks are typically constructed by mechanically translating English-centric datasets into target languages (e.g., English-to-Chinese). This approach introduces translation artifacts and neglects culturally specific entities native to the target language, failing to reflect the true knowledge distribution of LLMs. To address this, we propose CLM-Bench, a culture-aware benchmark constructed using a native Chinese-first methodology. We curate 1,010 high-quality CounterFact pairs rooted in Chinese cultural contexts and align them with English counterparts. Using CLM-Bench, we conduct extensive experiments on representative LLMs (e.g., Llama-3, Qwen2) and reveal a significant Cross-lingual Misalignment: edits in one language function independently and fail to propagate to the other. We further provide a geometric explanation via layer-wise representation analysis, demonstrating that edit vectors for Chinese and English are nearly orthogonal -- residing in disjoint subspaces -- while mixed-lingual editing exhibits linear additivity of these vectors. Our findings challenge the effectiveness of current methods in cross-lingual transfer and underscore the importance of culturally native benchmarks.