CAKE: Causal-Guided Adaptive Knowledge Editing for LLMs

LLMs have static pre-trained knowledge, leading to obsolescence and hallucinations. Knowledge Editing (KE) addresses these issues and typically requires multi-layer modifications. However, existing state-ofthe-art methods, largely following the Locate-Select-Assign-Edit (LSAE) paradigm, rely on fixed-layer selection and uniform residual assignment, ignoring the heterogeneous causal efficacy of different layers. To bridge this, we propose CAKE (Causal-Guided Adaptive Knowledge Editing), a collaborative editing method within the more general Locate-Weight-Assign-Edit (LWAE) paradigm that: (1) selectively identifies critical layers via causal tracing scores; and (2) adaptively allocates editing burdens based on causal weights rather than uniform assumptions. We formulate residual assignment as a constrained quadratic optimization problem and derive a solution for optimal residual allocation, showing that aligning edits with causal efficacy mitigates recursive error accumulation. Furthermore, we establish a generalized weight shift error bound, under which existing paradigms emerge as special, restricted cases. Experimental results demonstrate that CAKE achieves SOTA performance with comparable overhead, validating the superiority of causal-guided adaptation. Code at: https://github.com/zjh-vinky/CAKE .