IC-381Individual knowledge is not parameter-localizable in GPT-J: existing localization methods (KN, ROME, KC) are neither faithful nor reliable

Xiusheng Huang, Jiaxiang Liu, Yequan Wang, Jun Zhao, Kang Liu

SourceCapability Localization: Capabilities Can be Localized rather than Individual Knowledge

The paper rewrites 1000 factual prompts from COUNTERFACT five times using GPT-4o and applies three knowledge-localization methods (KN, ROME, KC) to GPT-J. The overlap of localized parameters across semantically identical prompts is only 37.3% (KN), 32.7% (ROME), and 7.2% (KC), showing the methods are not faithful. Reliability experiments on ZSRE show that doubling localized activations increases target probability in 85.1% of cases versus 72.3% for random parameters, and zeroing them decreases it in 72.4% versus 82.6% for random—marginal differences that do not confirm localization. KC's parameter-chain recall achieves only 12.3% accuracy. Editing non-localized layers in ROME yields similar performance to editing the localized layer.

Evidence
interventional
Key metric
fidelity overlap: KN 37.3%, ROME 32.7%, KC 7.2%; reliability: doubled activation 85.1% vs random 72.3% increase; zeroed activation 72.4% vs random 82.6% decrease; KC recall accuracy 12.3%; KC chain occupies 2.6% of model parameters
Caveat
Experiments limited to GPT-J (6B); the authors note in limitations that they did not evaluate on other models and the maximum parameter size tested is 7B.
Model
GPT-J
Concepts
Explanation faithfulness
Datasets
CounterFact / Counterfact dataset [eval], ZSRE [eval]
Methods
ROME [compared-to]
Related work
KN [compared-to], ROME [compared-to], KC [compared-to]
Related findings
IC-382
Extraction
automatic-extraction