English

Robust Knowledge Editing via Explicit Reasoning Chains for Distractor-Resilient Multi-Hop QA

Computation and Language 2025-09-03 v1

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) encode vast amounts of world knowledge but remain static once trained, making the timely integration of emerging facts prohibitively expensive via full retraining. Knowledge-editing techniques have thus emerged to inject or overwrite specific facts into LLMs, yet they either over-rely on superficial cues or incur complex, iterative pipelines that collapse under noisy, multi-hop conditions. We introduce Reason-KE, an end-to-end reasoning-chain-based editing framework that steers a pretrained LLM through four structured stages-fact acknowledgment, relevance determination, selective application, and final reasoning-to filter distractors in a single pass. Trained on MQuAKE-CF with up to four irrelevant facts, Reason-KE elevates Qwen2.5-7B's multi-hop QA accuracy to 90.2% while suffering merely a 6.3% drop under heavy distraction and <1% when answers are leaked. Our quantitative analysis confirms Reason-KE's resilience and efficiency, establishing a new state-of-the-art for reliable LLM knowledge updates.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.01468,
  title  = {Robust Knowledge Editing via Explicit Reasoning Chains for Distractor-Resilient Multi-Hop QA},
  author = {Yuchen Wu and Liang Ding and Li Shen and Dacheng Tao},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.01468},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

EMNLP 2025 Findings

R2 v1 2026-07-01T05:15:24.266Z