Related papers: Demystifying Language Model Forgetting with Low-ra…
Language models deployed in the wild make errors. However, simply updating the model with the corrected error instances causes catastrophic forgetting -- the updated model makes errors on instances learned during the instruction tuning or…
Large language models (LLMs) are often fine-tuned for use on downstream tasks, though this can degrade capabilities learned during previous training. This phenomenon, often referred to as catastrophic forgetting, has important potential…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
We study and quantify the problem of forgetting when fine-tuning pre-trained large language models (LLMs) on a downstream task. We find that parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) strategies, such as Low-Rank Adapters (LoRA), still suffer…
Language models (LMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in NLP, yet adapting them efficiently and robustly to specific tasks remains challenging. As their scale and complexity grow, fine-tuning LMs on labelled data often…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP), particularly in Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks. As we progress toward an agentic world where LLM-based agents autonomously handle…
The pretrained large language models (LLMs) are finetuned with labeled data for better instruction following ability and alignment with human values. In this paper, we study the learning dynamics of LLM finetuning on reasoning tasks and…
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…
Scaled post-training now drives many of the largest capability gains in language models (LMs), yet its effect on pretrained knowledge remains poorly understood. Not all forgetting is equal: Forgetting one fact (e.g., a U.S. president or an…
As the number of large language models (LLMs) released to the public grows, there is a pressing need to understand the safety implications associated with these models learning from third-party custom finetuning data. We explore the…
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,…
While task-agnostic debiasing provides notable generalizability and reduced reliance on downstream data, its impact on language modeling ability and the risk of relearning social biases from downstream task-specific data remain as the two…
Adapting language models (LMs) to new tasks via post-training carries the risk of degrading existing capabilities -- a phenomenon classically known as catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, toward identifying guidelines for mitigating this…
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…
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…
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…
Pretrained language models have achieved state-of-the-art performance when adapted to a downstream NLP task. However, theoretical analysis of these models is scarce and challenging since the pretraining and downstream tasks can be very…