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Related papers: Scaling Laws for Forgetting When Fine-Tuning Large…

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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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-05 Eric Zhang , Leshem Chosen , Jacob Andreas

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for downstream tasks often leads to catastrophic forgetting, notably degrading the safety of originally aligned models. While some existing methods attempt to restore safety by incorporating…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-29 Hua Farn , Hsuan Su , Shachi H Kumar , Saurav Sahay , Shang-Tse Chen , Hung-yi Lee

Mathematical reasoning is a challenging task for large language models (LLMs), while the scaling relationship of it with respect to LLM capacity is under-explored. In this paper, we investigate how the pre-training loss, supervised data…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-09-14 Zheng Yuan , Hongyi Yuan , Chengpeng Li , Guanting Dong , Keming Lu , Chuanqi Tan , Chang Zhou , Jingren Zhou

Federated learning (FL) is a popular paradigm for collaborative training which avoids direct data exposure between clients. However, data privacy issues still remain: FL-trained large language models are capable of memorizing and completing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Thierry Bossy , Julien Vignoud , Tahseen Rabbani , Juan R. Troncoso Pastoriza , Martin Jaggi

Fine-tuning a pre-trained model on a downstream task often degrades its original capabilities, a phenomenon known as "catastrophic forgetting". This is especially an issue when one does not have access to the data and recipe used to develop…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-13 Sunny Sanyal , Hayden Prairie , Rudrajit Das , Ali Kavis , Sujay Sanghavi

While large language models (LLMs) often adopt finetuning to unlock their capabilities for downstream applications, our understanding on the inductive biases (especially the scaling properties) of different finetuning methods is still…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-28 Biao Zhang , Zhongtao Liu , Colin Cherry , Orhan Firat

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly require mechanisms for continual adaptation without full retraining. However, sequential updates can lead to catastrophic forgetting, where new edits degrade previously acquired knowledge. This work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 William Hoy , Nurcin Celik

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is a widely-used parameter-efficient finetuning method for large language models. LoRA saves memory by training only low rank perturbations to selected weight matrices. In this work, we compare the performance of…

Adapting large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks via full fine-tuning is increasingly impractical due to its computational and memory demands. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) approaches such as Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Jing Gao , Zhong-Yi Lu , Pan Zhang , Ze-Feng Gao

Large language models (LLMs) acquire substantial world knowledge during pre-training, which is further shaped by post-training techniques such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT). However, the impact of SFT on a model's knowledge remains…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Junjie Ye , Yuming Yang , Yang Nan , Shuo Li , Qi Zhang , Tao Gui , Xuanjing Huang , Peng Wang , Zhongchao Shi , Jianping Fan

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) with high parameter efficiency for downstream tasks has become a new paradigm. Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) significantly reduces the number of trainable parameters for fine-tuning. Although it has…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-14 Jia-Chen Zhang , Yu-Jie Xiong , He-Xi Qiu , Dong-Hai Zhu , Chun-Ming Xia

Traditional Large Language Model (LLM) pretraining relies on autoregressive language modeling with randomly sampled data from web-scale datasets. Inspired by human learning techniques like spaced repetition, we hypothesize that random…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-30 Neha Prakriya , Jui-Nan Yen , Cho-Jui Hsieh , Jason Cong

Large language models (LLMs) often suffer from catastrophic forgetting in continual learning: after learning new tasks sequentially, they perform worse on earlier tasks. Existing methods mitigate catastrophic forgetting by data replay,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Yazheng Liu , Yuxuan Wan , Rui Xu , Xi Zhang , Sihong Xie , Hui Xiong

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) is often limited by the memory available on commodity GPUs. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods such as QLoRA reduce the number of trainable parameters, yet still incur high memory usage…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-17 Estelle Zheng , Nathan Cerisara , Sébastien Warichet , Emmanuel Helbert , Christophe Cerisara

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit strong general language capabilities. However, fine-tuning these models on domain-specific tasks often leads to catastrophic forgetting, where the model overwrites or loses essential knowledge acquired…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Shezheng Song , Hao Xu , Jun Ma , Shasha Li , Long Peng , Qian Wan , Xiaodong Liu , Jie Yu

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) aims to adapt pre-trained models to specific tasks using relatively small and domain-specific datasets. Among Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods, Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) stands out by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Yarui Cao , Kai Liu

Large language model (LLM) post-training enhances latent skills, unlocks value alignment, improves performance, and enables domain adaptation. Unfortunately, post-training is known to induce forgetting, especially in the ubiquitous use-case…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Lukas Thede , Stefan Winzeck , Zeynep Akata , Jonathan Richard Schwarz

The advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) for domain applications in fields such as materials science and engineering depends on the development of fine-tuning strategies that adapt models for specialized, technical capabilities. In…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-06 Wei Lu , Rachel K. Luu , Markus J. Buehler

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a common first stage of LLM post-training, teaching the model to follow instructions and shaping its behavior as a helpful assistant. At the same time, SFT may harm the fundamental capabilities of an LLM,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Mark Rofin , Aditya Varre , Nicolas Flammarion

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across diverse natural language processing tasks, but their tendency to memorize training data poses significant privacy risks, particularly during fine-tuning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-21 Badrinath Ramakrishnan , Akshaya Balaji