arXiv (Cornell University)
KnowledgeSmith: Uncovering Knowledge Updating in LLMs with Model Editing and Unlearning
October 2025 • Yinyi Luo, Z.D. Zhou, Hao Chen, Kai Qiu, Shaoping Li, Jindong Wang
Knowledge editing and machine unlearning are two popular approaches for large language models (LLMs) to stay up-to-date. However, the knowledge updating mechanism of LLMs remains largely unexplored due to insufficient, isolated, and small-scale evaluation. For instance, are LLMs similar to humans in modifying certain knowledge? What differs editing and unlearning as training data increases? This paper proposes KnowledgeSmith, a unified framework to systematically understand the updating mechanism of LLMs. We first…