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Related papers: Unforgettable Generalization in Language Models

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While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional multitasking abilities, fine-tuning these models on downstream, domain-specific datasets is often necessary to yield superior performance on test sets compared to their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-15 Haoran Yang , Yumeng Zhang , Jiaqi Xu , Hongyuan Lu , Pheng Ann Heng , Wai Lam

Large language models (LLMs) have shown great capabilities in various tasks but also exhibited memorization of training data, raising tremendous privacy and copyright concerns. While prior works have studied memorization during…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-02-26 Shenglai Zeng , Yaxin Li , Jie Ren , Yiding Liu , Han Xu , Pengfei He , Yue Xing , Shuaiqiang Wang , Jiliang Tang , Dawei Yin

The objective of digital forgetting is, given a model with undesirable knowledge or behavior, obtain a new model where the detected issues are no longer present. The motivations for forgetting include privacy protection, copyright…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-01-14 Alberto Blanco-Justicia , Najeeb Jebreel , Benet Manzanares , David Sánchez , Josep Domingo-Ferrer , Guillem Collell , Kuan Eeik Tan

While many have shown how Large Language Models (LLMs) can be applied to a diverse set of tasks, the critical issues of data contamination and memorization are often glossed over. In this work, we address this concern for tabular data.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-12 Sebastian Bordt , Harsha Nori , Rich Caruana

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-12 Damjan Kalajdzievski

Transformers have the capacity to act as supervised learning algorithms: by properly encoding a set of labeled training ("in-context") examples and an unlabeled test example into an input sequence of vectors of the same dimension, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-16 Spencer Frei , Gal Vardi

The relationship between memorization and generalization in large language models (LLMs) remains an open area of research, with growing evidence that the two are deeply intertwined. In this work, we investigate this relationship by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Joshua Barron , Devin White

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-04 Jiachen Zhao , Zhun Deng , David Madras , James Zou , Mengye Ren

Continual Learning research typically focuses on tackling the phenomenon of catastrophic forgetting in neural networks. Catastrophic forgetting is associated with an abrupt loss of knowledge previously learned by a model when the task, or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-06 MohammadReza Davari , Nader Asadi , Sudhir Mudur , Rahaf Aljundi , Eugene Belilovsky

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) and multimodal models (MMs) have exhibited impressive capabilities in various domains, particularly in general language understanding and visual reasoning. However, these models, trained on massive data, may not…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-19 Xinbo Wu , Max Hartman , Vidhata Arjun Jayaraman , Lav R. Varshney

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown to be a great success in a wide range of applications ranging from regular NLP-based use cases to AI agents. LLMs have been trained on a vast corpus of texts from various sources; despite the best…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-26 Abhinav Joshi , Shaswati Saha , Divyaksh Shukla , Sriram Vema , Harsh Jhamtani , Manas Gaur , Ashutosh Modi

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-01 Yihuai Hong , Dian Zhou , Meng Cao , Lei Yu , Zhijing Jin

Rote learning is a memorization technique based on repetition. Many researchers argue that rote learning hinders generalization because it encourages verbatim memorization rather than deeper understanding. This concern extends even to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Qinyuan Wu , Soumi Das , Mahsa Amani , Bishwamittra Ghosh , Mohammad Aflah Khan , Krishna P. Gummadi , Muhammad Bilal Zafar

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been successful in various domains like robotics, game playing, and simulation. While RL agents have shown impressive capabilities in their specific tasks, they insufficiently adapt to new tasks. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-30 Thomas Schmied , Markus Hofmarcher , Fabian Paischer , Razvan Pascanu , Sepp Hochreiter

The training of modern large language models (LLMs) takes place in a regime where most training examples are seen only a few times by the model during the course of training. What does a model remember about such examples seen only a few…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-03-31 A. Emin Orhan

Continual learning (CL), which aims to learn a sequence of tasks, has attracted significant recent attention. However, most work has focused on the experimental performance of CL, and theoretical studies of CL are still limited. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-14 Sen Lin , Peizhong Ju , Yingbin Liang , Ness Shroff

As large language models (LLMs) are applied across diverse domains, the ability to selectively unlearn specific information is becoming increasingly essential. For instance, LLMs are expected to selectively provide confidential information…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Shota Takashiro , Takeshi Kojima , Andrew Gambardella , Qi Cao , Yusuke Iwasawa , Yutaka Matsuo

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Howard Chen , Noam Razin , Karthik Narasimhan , Danqi Chen

Instruction tuning is now a widely adopted approach to aligning large multimodal models (LMMs) to follow human intent. It unifies the data format of vision-language tasks, enabling multi-task joint training. However, vision-language tasks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-29 Jinghan He , Haiyun Guo , Ming Tang , Jinqiao Wang