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Related papers: Unforgettable Generalization in Language Models

200 papers

Catastrophic forgetting (CF) poses a significant challenge in machine learning, where a model forgets previously learned information upon learning new tasks. Despite the advanced capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), they continue…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-17 Gangwei Jiang , Caigao Jiang , Zhaoyi Li , Siqiao Xue , Jun Zhou , Linqi Song , Defu Lian , Ying Wei

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive results in natural language processing but are prone to memorizing portions of their training data, which can compromise evaluation metrics, raise privacy concerns, and limit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-03 Eduardo Slonski

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-13 Jonas Wallat , Tianyi Zhang , Avishek Anand

We show that in language learning, contrary to received wisdom, keeping exceptional training instances in memory can be beneficial for generalization accuracy. We investigate this phenomenon empirically on a selection of benchmark natural…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Walter Daelemans , Antal van den Bosch , Jakub Zavrel

We investigate how Large Language Models (LLMs) distinguish between memorization and generalization at the neuron level. Through carefully designed tasks, we identify distinct neuron subsets responsible for each behavior. Experiments on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-10 Ko-Wei Huang , Yi-Fu Fu , Ching-Yu Tsai , Yu-Chieh Tu , Tzu-Ling Cheng , Cheng-Yu Lin , Yi-Ting Yang , Heng-Yi Liu , Keng-Te Liao , Da-Cheng Juan , Shou-De Lin

The lifelong learning paradigm in machine learning is an attractive alternative to the more prominent isolated learning scheme not only due to its resemblance to biological learning but also its potential to reduce energy waste by obviating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-30 Sanket Vaibhav Mehta , Darshan Patil , Sarath Chandar , Emma Strubell

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

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-07-16 Jérémie Dentan , Davide Buscaldi , Aymen Shabou , Sonia Vanier

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 2024-12-05 Sebastian Bordt , Harsha Nori , Vanessa Rodrigues , Besmira Nushi , Rich Caruana

We consider Representation Misdirection (RM), a class of large language model (LLM) unlearning methods that achieve forgetting by redirecting the forget-representations, that is, latent representations of forget-samples, toward a target…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Tien Dang , The-Hai Nguyen , Dinh Mai Phuong , Nguyen Minh Phuong , Anh Bui , Hoang Thanh-Tung , Le-Minh Nguyen , Naoya Inoue

While large language models (LLMs) showcase unprecedented capabilities, they also exhibit certain inherent limitations when facing seemingly trivial tasks. A prime example is the recently debated "reversal curse", which surfaces when…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-25 Zhengkai Lin , Zhihang Fu , Kai Liu , Liang Xie , Binbin Lin , Wenxiao Wang , Deng Cai , Yue Wu , Jieping Ye

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-02 Gangwei Jiang , Zhaoyi Li , Defu Lian , Ying Wei

A distinction is often drawn between a model's ability to predict a label for an evaluation sample that is directly memorised from highly similar training samples versus an ability to predict the label via some method of generalisation. In…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-22 Tim Hartill , Joshua Bensemann , Michael Witbrock , Patricia J. Riddle

Deep networks have been known to have extraordinary generalization abilities, via mechanisms that aren't yet well understood. It is also known that upon shuffling labels in the training data to varying degrees, deep networks, trained with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Simran Ketha , Venkatakrishnan Ramaswamy

Large language models (LLMs) often necessitate extensive labeled datasets and training compute to achieve impressive performance across downstream tasks. This paper explores a self-training paradigm, where the LLM autonomously curates its…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-13 Wei Jie Yeo , Teddy Ferdinan , Przemyslaw Kazienko , Ranjan Satapathy , Erik Cambria

A fundamental challenge in developing general learning algorithms is their tendency to forget past knowledge when adapting to new data. Addressing this problem requires a principled understanding of forgetting; yet, despite decades of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Ben Sanati , Thomas L. Lee , Trevor McInroe , Aidan Scannell , Nikolay Malkin , David Abel , Amos Storkey

Large Language Models (LLMs), trained on massive corpora with billions of parameters, show unprecedented performance in various fields. Though surprised by their excellent performances, researchers also noticed some special behaviors of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Bowen Chen , Namgi Han , Yusuke Miyao

To produce accurate predictions, language models (LMs) must balance between generalization and memorization. Yet, little is known about the mechanism by which transformer LMs employ their memorization capacity. When does a model decide to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-02-14 Adi Haviv , Ido Cohen , Jacob Gidron , Roei Schuster , Yoav Goldberg , Mor Geva

Catastrophic Forgetting (CF) means models forgetting previously acquired knowledge when learning new data. It compromises the effectiveness of large language models (LLMs) during fine-tuning, yet the underlying causes have not been…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-10 Hongyu Li , Liang Ding , Meng Fang , Dacheng Tao

Catastrophic forgetting is a significant challenge in continual learning, in which a model loses prior knowledge when it is fine-tuned on new tasks. This problem is particularly critical for large language models (LLMs) undergoing continual…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Ege Süalp , Mina Rezaei