CLaRE-ty Amid Chaos: Quantifying Representational Entanglement to Predict Ripple Effects in LLM Editing

Abstract

The static knowledge representations of large language models (LLMs) inevitably become outdated or incorrect over time. While model-editing techniques offer a promising solution by modifying a model's factual associations, they often produce unpredictable ripple effects, which are unintended behavioral changes that propagate even to the hidden space. In this work, we introduce CLaRE, a lightweight representation-level technique to identify where these ripple effects may occur. Unlike prior gradient-based methods, CLaRE quantifies entanglement between facts using forward activations from a single intermediate layer, avoiding costly backward passes. To enable systematic study, we prepare and analyse a corpus of 11,427 facts drawn from three existing datasets. Using CLaRE, we compute large-scale entanglement graphs of this corpus for multiple models, capturing how local edits propagate through representational space. These graphs enable stronger preservation sets for model editing, audit trails, efficient red-teaming, and scalable post-edit evaluation. In comparison to baselines, CLaRE achieves an average of 62.2% improvement in Spearman correlation with ripple effects while being 2.74 faster, and using 2.85 less peak GPU memory. Besides, CLaRE requires only a fraction of the storage needed by the baselines to compute and preserve fact representations. Our entanglement graphs and corpus are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CLaRE-488E.

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