Research / research/notes/4.6_knowledge_localization_editing.md

documentPhase 1 notes — §4.6 Knowledge localization and editingauthorSimon-Pierre BouchercreatedTue Aug 11 2026 20:00:00 GMT-0400 (heure avancée de l’Est)statusdraft

§4.6 — Knowledge localization and editing

B1–B2. ROME and MEMIT

B3–B5. PMET, EMMET, AlphaEdit

B6. Knowledge neurons

B7. Storage vs retrieval — the current consensus scaffold

  • Key papers: Geva et al., EMNLP 2023, https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.14767 (three-stage recall: early-MLP subject enrichment → relation propagation → attribute extraction by attention heads; causal via attention knockouts); attribute lens / linear relation decoding: Hernandez et al., ICLR 2024, https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.09124 (~48% of relations well-fit by a single affine map — linearity NOT universal); additive mechanisms: Chughtai, Cooney, Nanda 2024, https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.07321 (recall = sum of qualitatively different mechanisms — complicates clean localization).
  • Consensus: MLPs store, attention retrieves — established; details (additivity, linearity coverage) contested.
  • Cost: all Mac-feasible ≤7B.

B8. The localization-vs-editing critique — central calibration datum for Q1

  • Key paper: Hase et al., NeurIPS 2023, https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.04213
  • Substance: causal-tracing localization does not predict which layer edits best; edit success near-uniform across layers; tracing effects explain a tiny fraction of edit-success variance. "Edit success" cannot be used as evidence of localization — design Experiment C accordingly.
  • Related: Rebuilding ROME (collapse partly implementation asymmetry, https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.07175); Should We Really Edit Language Models? (evaluation misleading, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.18785)
  • Epistemic status: Established — a causal audit of a causal method. Reproduction Mac-feasible on GPT-2-XL.

B9. Ripple effects

B10. Sequential-editing collapse and general-ability damage

B11. Multilingual knowledge sharing and cross-lingual editing

B12. Tooling and Apple Silicon reality check

  • EasyEdit https://github.com/zjunlp/EasyEdit (ACL 2024) unifies ROME/MEMIT/PMET/AlphaEdit + KnowEdit benchmark; surveys: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.16218 , https://arxiv.org/pdf/2401.01286
  • All editing repos are CUDA-first; none advertises MPS support. The math is small-matrix linear algebra — an MLX/MPS reimplementation is tractable and itself a publishable modelmap artifact ("knowledge editing on consumer Macs"). The only expensive step is covariance precomputation (hours of forward passes at 7B on 64 GB).

Implications for modelmap

  1. Never infer localization from edit success (Hase). Experiment C's correlational→causal survival rate must use patching/ablation, with editing as a separate axis.
  2. The storage-vs-retrieval scaffold (B7) gives concrete map types: subject-enrichment maps (MLP), extraction maps (attention heads).
  3. Multilingual localization atlas (FR/EN) has solid prior art to build on and clear open questions.
  4. MLX knowledge-editing port = concrete tooling contribution.