Improving Atomic-Fact Recall via Focused Views in Unstructured Knowledge Editing

Ding Wu, Ye Zhang, Haoyu Wang, Tianci Liu

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly serve as general-purpose interfaces to factual knowledge, but their parameters do not automatically reflect information that changes after pretraining. Knowledge editing (KE) provides a targeted alternative to costly retraining by modifying selected knowledge and preserving unrelated knowledge and general capabilities. Conventional KE uses structured factual triples, whereas unstructured KE (UKE) uses free-form passages containing multiple facts. Nonetheless, existing UKE editors exhibit a failure mode known as context reliance: edited LLMs can often reproduce the editing passage but fail to reliably recall its individual facts without the original passage context. We identify context-induced difficulty underestimation under the standard passage-level editing objective: later facts receive increasingly rich ground-truth context and consequently incur lower initial losses, making them appear easier to learn. In response, we propose FOVEATED, a plug-and-play framework that constructs focused views of each sentence by randomly shifting the Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) positions assigned to the keys of its preceding context. The…