ThinkEval: Practical Evaluation of Knowledge Preservation and Consistency in LLM Editing with Thought-based Knowledge Graphs

Abstract: Model editing has become an important tool for addressing privacy, bias, and misinformation in LLMs by enabling updates to knowledge without the need for retraining from scratch. However, existing editing techniques often target isolated facts, ignoring ripple effects on related knowledge, allowing edited facts to remain deducible and compromising broader contextual integrity. For example, changing Harry Potter's school from Hogwarts to Ilvermorny requires reassigning his house from Gryffindor to a suitable alternative while preserving Gryffindor's relationship with Hogwarts. In this work, we present a new model-editing setting, deep editing, to show: (1) how editing techniques fail to handle connected facts, evaluating how original knowledge sneaks through unchanged causal links, and (2) their impact on broader contextual knowledge. We introduce ThinkEval, a framework to systematically evaluate model-editing techniques by building model-specific knowledge graphs to analyze pre- and post-edit effects on fact persistence and catastrophic forgetting. We present KnowGIC, a benchmark created with ThinkEval, consisting of sequentially linked queries to measure these effects. We evaluate five editing techniques: AlphaEdit, RECT, ROME, MEMIT, and PRUNE across multiple LLMs. We find that these techniques struggle to balance indirect fact suppression with the preservation of related knowledge. Our dataset is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/KnowGIC.