# Revisiting Parameter-Based Knowledge Editing in Large Language Models: Theoretical Limits and Empirical Evidence

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.00570 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.00570/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 125 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

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- [Think you have Solved Question Answering? Try ARC, the AI2 Reasoning Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05457/) (2018)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [Mistral 7B](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06825/) (2023)
- [GPQA: A Graduate-Level Google-Proof Q&A Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12022/) (2023)
- [An Empirical Study of Catastrophic Forgetting in Large Language Models During Continual Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08747/) (2023)
- [Fast Model Editing at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11309/) (2021)
- [AdaLoRA: Adaptive Budget Allocation for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10512/) (2023)
- [Embers of Autoregression: Understanding Large Language Models Through the Problem They are Trained to Solve](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13638/) (2023)
- [A Comprehensive Study of Knowledge Editing for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01286/) (2024)
- [A Review on Language Models as Knowledge Bases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06031/) (2022)
- [Editable Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00345/) (2020)
- [Physics of Language Models: Part 3.3, Knowledge Capacity Scaling Laws](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05405/) (2024)
- [Inspecting and Editing Knowledge Representations in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00740/) (2023)
- [Strong Model Collapse](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04840/) (2024)
- [UnUnlearning: Unlearning is not sufficient for content regulation in advanced generative AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00106/) (2024)
- [Interpreting Key Mechanisms of Factual Recall in Transformer-Based Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19521/) (2024)
- [The Mirage of Model Editing: Revisiting Evaluation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11177/) (2025)
- [DyKnow: Dynamically Verifying Time-Sensitive Factual Knowledge in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08700/) (2024)
- [Unlocking Efficient, Scalable, and Continual Knowledge Editing with Basis-Level Representation Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00306/) (2025)
- [Knowledge Updating? No More Model Editing! Just Selective Contextual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05212/) (2025)
- [Editing the Mind of Giants: An In-Depth Exploration of Pitfalls of Knowledge Editing in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01436/) (2024)
- [Consecutive Batch Model Editing with HooK Layers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05330/) (2024)
- [Event-level Knowledge Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13093/) (2024)
- [MEMoE: Enhancing Model Editing with Mixture of Experts Adaptors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19086/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Parameter-based knowledge editing updates the internal knowledge of large language models (LLMs) via localized weight modifications and has attracted significant attention. However, most existing methods overlook fundamental theoretical limitations and are rarely evaluated under realistic, practice-oriented settings. In this paper, we first present a theoretical analysis based on the dimensional Collapse Hypothesis, explaining how localized parameter edits can propagate along fragile directions in the representation space, inducing global interference and ultimately causing reasoning collapse. Building on this insight, we conduct a comprehensive empirical evaluation by systematically varying knowledge complexity, number of edits, evaluation dimensions, and baseline methods. Our results show that parameter-based editing methods consistently damage core LLM capabilities. In contrast, a simple retrieval-based baseline achieves consistently stronger performance than all parameter-editing methods across all evaluated conditions. These findings highlight that preserving the fundamental capabilities of LLMs after knowledge editing should be a central concern for future research.