Related papers: Retentive or Forgetful? Diving into the Knowledge …
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,…
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…
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…
Large Language Models (LLMs) store and retrieve vast amounts of factual knowledge acquired during pre-training. Prior research has localized and identified mechanisms behind knowledge recall; however, it has only focused on English…
Catastrophic forgetting remains a formidable obstacle to building an omniscient model in large language models (LLMs). Despite the pioneering research on task-level forgetting in LLM fine-tuning, there is scant focus on forgetting during…
When language models (LMs) are trained to forget (or "unlearn'') a skill, how precisely does their behavior change? We study the behavior of transformer LMs in which tasks have been forgotten via fine-tuning on randomized labels. Such LMs…
Human memory is fleeting. As words are processed, the exact wordforms that make up incoming sentences are rapidly lost. Cognitive scientists have long believed that this limitation of memory may, paradoxically, help in learning language -…
Large language models (LLMs) excel on a variety of reasoning benchmarks, but previous studies suggest they sometimes struggle to generalize to unseen questions, potentially due to over-reliance on memorized training examples. However, the…
Large language models may encode sensitive information or outdated knowledge that needs to be removed, to ensure responsible and compliant model responses. Unlearning has emerged as an efficient alternative to full retraining, aiming to…
Continual learning is a long-standing challenge in robot policy learning, where a policy must acquire new skills over time without catastrophically forgetting previously learned ones. While prior work has extensively studied continual…
The ability of machine learning models to store input information in hidden layer vector embeddings, analogous to the concept of `memory', is widely employed but not well characterized. We find that language model embeddings typically…
Pretrained language models (PLMs) are today the primary model for natural language processing. Despite their impressive downstream performance, it can be difficult to apply PLMs to new languages, a barrier to making their capabilities…
Large Language Models have received significant attention due to their abilities to solve a wide range of complex tasks. However these models memorize a significant proportion of their training data, posing a serious threat when disclosed…
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…
Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable proficiency across various tasks. Given the potent applications of LLMs in numerous fields, there has been a surge in LLM development. In developing LLMs, a common…
State-of-the-art pre-trained language models have been shown to memorise facts and perform well with limited amounts of training data. To gain a better understanding of how these models learn, we study their generalisation and memorisation…
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…
Acquiring factual knowledge with Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) has attracted increasing attention, showing promising performance in many knowledge-intensive tasks. Their good performance has led the community to believe that the models…
Machine learning models exhibit two seemingly contradictory phenomena: training data memorization, and various forms of forgetting. In memorization, models overfit specific training examples and become susceptible to privacy attacks. In…
Language models can store vast factual knowledge, yet their ability to flexibly use this knowledge for downstream tasks (e.g., via instruction finetuning) remains questionable. This paper investigates four fundamental knowledge manipulation…