Model editing aims to correct outdated or erroneous knowledge in large language models (LLMs) without the need for costly retraining. Lifelong model editing is the most challenging task that caters to the continuous editing requirements of LLMs. Prior works primarily focus on single or batch editing; nevertheless, these methods fall short in lifelong editing scenarios due to catastrophic knowledge forgetting and the degradation of model performance. Although retrieval-based methods alleviate these issues, they are impeded by slow and cumbersome processes of integrating the retrieved knowledge into the model. In this work, we introduce RECIPE, a RetriEval-augmented ContInuous Prompt lEarning method, to boost editing efficacy and inference efficiency in lifelong learning. RECIPE first converts knowledge statements into short and informative continuous prompts, prefixed to the LLM's input query embedding, to efficiently refine the response grounded on the knowledge. It further integrates the Knowledge Sentinel (KS) that acts as an intermediary to calculate a dynamic threshold, determining whether the retrieval repository contains relevant knowledge. Our retriever and prompt encoder are jointly trained to achieve editing properties, i.e., reliability, generality, and locality. In our experiments, RECIPE is assessed extensively across multiple LLMs and editing datasets, where it achieves superior editing performance. RECIPE also demonstrates its capability to maintain the overall performance of LLMs alongside showcasing fast editing and inference speed.
Retrieval-augmented large language models (LLMs) leverage relevant content retrieved by information retrieval systems to generate correct responses, aiming to alleviate the hallucination problem. However, existing retriever-responder methods typically append relevant documents to the prompt of LLMs to perform text generation tasks without considering the interaction of fine-grained structural semantics between the retrieved documents and the LLMs. This issue is particularly important for accurate response generation as LLMs tend to ``lose in the middle'' when dealing with input prompts augmented with lengthy documents. In this work, we propose a new pipeline named ``Reinforced Retriever-Reorder-Responder'' (R$^4$) to learn document orderings for retrieval-augmented LLMs, thereby further enhancing their generation abilities while the large numbers of parameters of LLMs remain frozen. The reordering learning process is divided into two steps according to the quality of the generated responses: document order adjustment and document representation enhancement. Specifically, document order adjustment aims to organize retrieved document orderings into beginning, middle, and end positions based on graph attention learning, which maximizes the reinforced reward of response quality. Document representation enhancement further refines the representations of retrieved documents for responses of poor quality via document-level gradient adversarial learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed pipeline achieves better factual question-answering performance on knowledge-intensive tasks compared to strong baselines across various public datasets. The source codes and trained models will be released upon paper acceptance.