Edit Knowledge, Not Just Facts via Multi-Step Reasoning over Background Stories
cs.AI
Submitted: 2026-02-02
Updated: 2026-09-01
Comments: Accepted by EMNLP 2026; Code available at: https://github.com/yagao403/KnowledgeEdit-EMNLP2026
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: Enabling artificial intelligence systems, particularly large language models, to update knowledge and flexibly apply it during reasoning remains a central challenge.
Terminology
Abstract
Enabling artificial intelligence systems, particularly large language models, to update knowledge and flexibly apply it during reasoning remains a central challenge. Existing knowledge editing approaches emphasize atomic facts, improving factual recall but often failing to integrate updated information into a coherent framework usable across contexts. In this work, we argue that knowledge update is fundamentally a reasoning problem rather than a memorization problem. Consequently, a model should be trained in situations where the new information is instrumental to solving a task, combined with pre-existing knowledge, and exercised through multi-step reasoning. Based on this insight, we propose a training strategy based on three principles. First, new knowledge is introduced as a coherent background story that contextualizes novel facts and explains their relation to existing knowledge. Second, models are trained using self-generated multi-hop questions that require multi-step reasoning involving the new information. Third, training is done using knowledge distillation, forcing a student model to internalize the teacher's reasoning behavior without access to the novel information. Experiments show that models trained with this strategy effectively leverage newly acquired knowledge during reasoning and achieve remarkable performance on challenging questions that require combining multiple new facts.
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