rome-directional-edits

IN premise — summaries/2026/08/24/meng-2022-rome-s4-related-work.md

Created 2026-08-25T02:58:15+00:00

ROME edits are directional: 'A is B' and 'B is A' are stored as separate associations and require two independent edits to alter both.

Summary

Each ROME edit only updates one direction of a relationship, so if you need the model to know both "X is Y" and "Y is X," you must run two separate edits. In practice, this means no single edit fully reverses or mirrors a fact; you have to explicitly handle both directions to keep the model's knowledge consistent.

Dependents

These beliefs depend on this one:

OUT directional-edits-as-microcosm-of-read-write-asymmetry — ROME's directionality constraint (A→B requires a separate edit from B→A) is the micro-level instantiation of the macro read-broad/write-narrow asymmetry: the same over-complete superposition that makes reading a simultaneous projection across many features makes writing a sequential, direction-specific projection onto one
IN directionality-as-universal-geometric-property — Asymmetry (A→B ≠ B→A) appears independently in ROME's separate-edit constraint, Park's signed binary contrasts (ℓ̄_{w0⇒w1} = ℓ̄_{w1} − ℓ̄_{w0}), and SBERT's tied-weight siamese architecture, establishing directionality as an invariant geometric property of the superposed space rather than a per-implementation artifact.