Towards a Unified Paradigm of Concept Editing in Large Language Models

Concept editing aims to control specific concepts in large language models (LLMs) and is an emerging subfield of model editing. Despite the emergence of various editing methods in recent years, there remains a lack of rigorous theoretical analysis and a unified perspective to systematically understand and compare these methods. To address this gap, we propose a unified paradigm for concept editing methods, in which all forms of conceptual injection are aligned at the neuron level. We study four representative concept editing methods: Neuron Editing (NE), Supervised Fine-tuning (SFT), Sparse Autoencoder (SAE), and Steering Vector (SV). Then we categorize them into two classes based on their mode of conceptual information injection: indirect (NE, SFT) and direct (SAE, SV). We evaluate above methods along four dimensions: editing reliability, output generalization, neuron level consistency, and mathematical formalization. Experiments show that SAE achieves the best editing reliability. In output generalization, SAE captures features closer to human-understood concepts, while NE tends to locate text patterns rather than true semantics. Neuron-level analysis reveals that direct methods share high neuron overlap, as do indirect methods, indicating methodological commonality within each category. Our unified paradigm offers a clear framework and valuable insights for advancing interpretability and controlled generation in LLMs.