Merging Methods for Multilingual Knowledge Editing for Large Language Models: An Empirical Odyssey
Authors: Kunil Lee, Ki-Young Shin, Jong-Hyeok Lee et al.
Summary
arXiv:2605. 13919v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multilingual knowledge editing (MKE) remains challenging because language-specific edits interfere with one another, even when locate-then-edit methods work well in monolingual settings.
Relevance
Read next because Merging Methods for Multilingual Knowledge Editing for Large Language Models: An Empirical Odyssey overlaps with clean result "Language-mismatch LoRA SFT on Qwen2.5-7B leaks the trained completion language into bystander directives the model was never trained on, absent under same-language SFT (LOW confidence)", clean result "Only continuous soft prefixes hit both EM axes at once on Qwen-2.5-7B-Instruct: discrete prompt searches split between the alignment objective and the distributional objective, and both discretizations of the soft prefix collapse (MODERATE confidence)", clean result "The marker is a representational handle, not a behavioural one — sharing it between a villain persona and the assistant transfers no misalignment (HIGH confidence)". Matching terms: under, eval, rate, without, factor, another, language, model. Source: arxiv cs.CL (NLP).
Threat model
Potential threat/caveat for clean result "Language-mismatch LoRA SFT on Qwen2.5-7B leaks the trained completion language into bystander directives the model was never trained on, absent under same-language SFT (LOW confidence)": this item discusses benchmark.
Abstract
arXiv:2605.13919v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multilingual knowledge editing (MKE) remains challenging because language-specific edits interfere with one another, even when locate-then-edit methods work well in monolingual settings. This paper focuses on three issues: the effectiveness of vector merging methods for MKE, the extent to which Task Singular Vectors for Merging (TSVM) can reduce multilingual interference, and the influence of the weight scaling factor and rank compression ratio on performance. We evaluate six merging variants with two popular backbone large language models, two base knowledge editing methods, and 12 languages on the MzsRE benchmark under a large-scale batch-editing setting. Our results show that vector summation with shared covariance is the most reliable overall strategy, whereas simple summation without shared covariance performs poorly. TSVM improves performance in some settings, but its ability to mitigate multilingual interference is limited. We also find that performance is sensitive to both weight scale and rank ratio, with larger-than-default scaling and relatively low rank often yielding better results. These findings clarify the practical strengths and limits of current vector merging methods for MKE and provide guidance for future multilingual knowledge editing research.