Related papers: What Will My Model Forget? Forecasting Forgotten E…

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable generative capabilities but raise ethical and security concerns by memorizing sensitive data, reinforcing biases, and producing harmful content. These risks have spurred interest in LLM…

Large language models (LMs) have been shown to memorize parts of their training data, and when prompted appropriately, they will emit the memorized training data verbatim. This is undesirable because memorization violates privacy (exposing…

Pretrained models of code, such as CodeBERT and CodeT5, have become popular choices for code understanding and generation tasks. Such models tend to be large and require commensurate volumes of training data, which are rarely available for…

Many real-world applications require machine-learning models to be able to deal with non-stationary data distributions and thus learn autonomously over an extended period of time, often in an online setting. One of the main challenges in…

Web-scale pre-training datasets are the cornerstone of LLMs' success. However, text data curated from the Internet inevitably contains random noise caused by decoding errors or unregulated web content. In contrast to previous works that…

Current unlearning methods for large language models usually rely on reverse optimization to reduce target token probabilities. However, this paradigm disrupts the subsequent tokens prediction, degrading model performance and linguistic…

Recent advances in language modeling consist in pretraining highly parameterized neural networks on extremely large web-mined text corpora. Training and inference with such models can be costly in practice, which incentivizes the use of…

The forgetting curve has been extensively explored by psychologists, educationalists and cognitive scientists alike. In the context of Intelligent Tutoring Systems, modelling the forgetting curve for each user and knowledge component (e.g.…

How can we teach large multimodal models (LMMs) new skills without erasing prior abilities? We study sequential fine-tuning on five target skills while monitoring general ability on eight held-out benchmarks across three model families.…

In various fields of knowledge creation, including science, new ideas often build on pre-existing information. In this work, we explore this concept within the context of language models. Specifically, we explore the potential of…

Continual learning (CL) aims to incrementally learn different tasks (such as classification) in a non-stationary data stream without forgetting old ones. Most CL works focus on tackling catastrophic forgetting under a learning-from-scratch…

Cross-lingual transfer in natural language processing (NLP) models enhances multilingual performance by leveraging shared linguistic knowledge. However, traditional methods that process all data simultaneously often fail to mimic real-world…

Machine unlearning algorithms are increasingly important as legal concerns arise around the provenance of training data, but verifying the success of unlearning is often difficult. Provable guarantees for unlearning are often limited to…

We propose incremental (re)training of a neural network model to cope with a continuous flow of new data in inference during model serving. As such, this is a life-long learning process. We address two challenges of life-long retraining:…

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…

Pre-training has achieved remarkable success when transferred to downstream tasks. In machine learning, we care about not only the good performance of a model but also its behavior under reasonable shifts of condition. The same philosophy…

The ability to acquire latent semantics is one of the key properties that determines the performance of language models. One convenient approach to invoke this ability is to prepend metadata (e.g. URLs, domains, and styles) at the beginning…

Forgetting is often seen as an unwanted characteristic in both human and machine learning. However, we propose that forgetting can in fact be favorable to learning. We introduce "forget-and-relearn" as a powerful paradigm for shaping the…

Large language models (LLMs) have made rapid progress, yet adapting them to downstream scenarios still commonly relies on supervised fine-tuning (SFT). When downstream data exhibit a substantial distribution shift from the model's prior…

Sample-efficient online reinforcement learning often uses replay buffers to store experience for reuse when updating the value function. However, uniform replay is inefficient, since certain classes of transitions can be more relevant to…