English
Related papers

Related papers: Investigating Forgetting in Pre-Trained Representa…

200 papers

Pre-trained models are nowadays a fundamental component of machine learning research. In continual learning, they are commonly used to initialize the model before training on the stream of non-stationary data. However, pre-training is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-20 Andrea Cossu , Tinne Tuytelaars , Antonio Carta , Lucia Passaro , Vincenzo Lomonaco , Davide Bacciu

Catastrophic forgetting (CF) is a phenomenon that occurs in machine learning when a model forgets previously learned information while acquiring new knowledge for achieving a satisfactory performance in downstream tasks. As large language…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-07 Yun Luo , Zhen Yang , Fandong Meng , Yafu Li , Jie Zhou , Yue Zhang

Memory is one of the most essential cognitive functions serving as a repository of world knowledge and episodes of activities. In recent years, large-scale pre-trained language models have shown remarkable memorizing ability. On the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-14 Boxi Cao , Qiaoyu Tang , Hongyu Lin , Shanshan Jiang , Bin Dong , Xianpei Han , Jiawei Chen , Tianshu Wang , Le Sun

Large Language Models (LLMs) are often evaluated against ideals of perfect Bayesian inference, yet growing evidence suggests that their in-context reasoning exhibits systematic forgetting of past information. Rather than viewing this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Alexandros Christoforos

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) can cause them to lose their general capabilities. However, the intrinsic mechanisms behind such forgetting remain unexplored. In this paper, we begin by examining this phenomenon by focusing on…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-02 Gangwei Jiang , Zhaoyi Li , Defu Lian , Ying Wei

Continual learning studies how models can adapt to new tasks while retaining previously acquired knowledge. Although a broad spectrum of methods has been proposed to mitigate catastrophic forgetting, the field remains predominantly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Katarzyna Filus , Kamil Faber , Roberto Corizzo , Christopher Kanan

A fundamental challenge in developing general learning algorithms is their tendency to forget past knowledge when adapting to new data. Addressing this problem requires a principled understanding of forgetting; yet, despite decades of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Ben Sanati , Thomas L. Lee , Trevor McInroe , Aidan Scannell , Nikolay Malkin , David Abel , Amos Storkey

Large language models exhibit remarkable performance across diverse tasks through pre-training and fine-tuning paradigms. However, continual fine-tuning on sequential tasks induces catastrophic forgetting, where newly acquired knowledge…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Olaf Yunus Laitinen Imanov

Models trained on a new task typically degrade on prior tasks, a phenomenon known as forgetting. Traditionally, mitigating forgetting has required replaying stored exemplars from prior tasks, which is often impractical. By contrast,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Martin Marek , Dongkyu Cho , Shikai Qiu , Rumi Chunara , Pavel Izmailov , Andrew Gordon Wilson

Language models retain a significant amount of world knowledge from their pre-training stage. This allows knowledgeable models to be applied to knowledge-intensive tasks prevalent in information retrieval, such as ranking or question…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-13 Jonas Wallat , Tianyi Zhang , Avishek Anand

Catastrophic forgetting (CF) poses a significant challenge in machine learning, where a model forgets previously learned information upon learning new tasks. Despite the advanced capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), they continue…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-17 Gangwei Jiang , Caigao Jiang , Zhaoyi Li , Siqiao Xue , Jun Zhou , Linqi Song , Defu Lian , Ying Wei

Catastrophic forgetting in continual learning is often measured at the performance or last-layer representation level, overlooking the underlying mechanisms. We introduce a mechanistic framework that offers a geometric interpretation of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Sergi Masip , Gido M. van de Ven , Javier Ferrando , Tinne Tuytelaars

Continual learning, focused on sequentially learning multiple tasks, has gained significant attention recently. Despite the tremendous progress made in the past, the theoretical understanding, especially factors contributing to catastrophic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-29 Meng Ding , Kaiyi Ji , Di Wang , Jinhui Xu

Recently, the pretrain-finetune paradigm has become a cornerstone in various deep learning areas. While in general the pre-trained model would promote both effectiveness and efficiency of downstream tasks fine-tuning, studies have shown…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Chunyang Jiang , Chi-min Chan , Yiyang Cai , Yulong Liu , Wei Xue , Yike Guo

End-to-end training of Spoken Language Models (SLMs) commonly involves adapting pre-trained text-based Large Language Models (LLMs) to the speech modality through multi-stage training on diverse tasks such as ASR, TTS and spoken question…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Chi-Yuan Hsiao , Ke-Han Lu , Kai-Wei Chang , Chih-Kai Yang , Wei-Chih Chen , Hung-yi Lee

Despite the remarkable capabilities of modern large language models (LLMs), the mechanisms behind their problem-solving abilities remain elusive. In this work, we aim to better understand how the learning dynamics of LLM finetuning shapes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Katie Kang , Amrith Setlur , Dibya Ghosh , Jacob Steinhardt , Claire Tomlin , Sergey Levine , Aviral Kumar

It has been observed that neural networks perform poorly when the data or tasks are presented sequentially. Unlike humans, neural networks suffer greatly from catastrophic forgetting, making it impossible to perform life-long learning. To…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-31 Longhui Yu , Tianyang Hu , Lanqing Hong , Zhen Liu , Adrian Weller , Weiyang Liu

Neural machine translation (NMT) models usually suffer from catastrophic forgetting during continual training where the models tend to gradually forget previously learned knowledge and swing to fit the newly added data which may have a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-12-01 Shuhao Gu , Yang Feng

Catastrophic Forgetting (CF) means models forgetting previously acquired knowledge when learning new data. It compromises the effectiveness of large language models (LLMs) during fine-tuning, yet the underlying causes have not been…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-10 Hongyu Li , Liang Ding , Meng Fang , Dacheng Tao

Continual learning refers to a dynamical framework in which a model receives a stream of non-stationary data over time and must adapt to new data while preserving previously acquired knowledge. Unluckily, neural networks fail to meet these…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-05-24 Umberto Cappellazzo , Daniele Falavigna , Alessio Brutti