Title
Knowledge Neurons in Pretrained Transformers
Abstract
Large-scale pretrained language models are surprisingly good at recalling factual knowledge presented in the training corpus (Petroni et al., 2019; Jiang et al., 2020b). In this paper, we present preliminary studies on how factual knowledge is stored in pretrained Transformers by introducing the concept of knowledge neurons. Specifically, we examine the fill-in-the-blank cloze task for BERT. Given a relational fact, we propose a knowledge attribution method to identify the neurons that express the fact. We find that the activation of such knowledge neurons is positively correlated to the expression of their corresponding facts. In our case studies, we attempt to leverage knowledge neurons to edit (such as update, and erase) specific factual knowledge without fine-tuning. Our results shed light on understanding the storage of knowledge within pretrained Transformers. The code is available at https://github.com/Hunter-DDM/knowledge-neurons.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.581
PROCEEDINGS OF THE 60TH ANNUAL MEETING OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS (ACL 2022), VOL 1: (LONG PAPERS)
DocType
Volume
Citations 
Conference
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Damai Dai112.72
Li Dong258231.86
Yaru Hao300.34
Zhifang Sui417239.06
Furu Wei51956107.57