StepKE: Stepwise Knowledge Editing for Multi-Hop Question Answering

AbstractKnowledge editing aims to update Large Language Models (LLMs) with new information without costly retraining. However, consistently reflecting these updates in complex multi-hop Question Answering (QA), which demands reasoning over interconnected facts, is challenging. Many existing methods overlook the interplay with pre-existing knowledge, leading to inconsistent edit propagation. To overcome this, we introduce StepKE (Stepwise Knowledge Editing for Multi-hop QA), a novel framework for robustly integrating edited and existing knowledge for coherent multi-hop reasoning. StepKE uniquely decomposes multi-hop questions into sequential single-hop sub-questions, retrieving relevant facts (both edited and pre-existing) from an external knowledge graph for each step. It employs context-aware prompting with prior reasoning history and fine-tuning for precise edit propagation. This systematic integration enables effective stepwise reasoning. Experiments show StepKE generates significantly more accurate and consistent responses than baselines, showcasing strong knowledge editing and integration in multi-hop QA.