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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

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,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Martin Marek , Dongkyu Cho , Shikai Qiu , Rumi Chunara , Pavel Izmailov , Andrew Gordon Wilson

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

Pretrained language models (PLMs) are today the primary model for natural language processing. Despite their impressive downstream performance, it can be difficult to apply PLMs to new languages, a barrier to making their capabilities…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-15 Yihong Chen , Kelly Marchisio , Roberta Raileanu , David Ifeoluwa Adelani , Pontus Stenetorp , Sebastian Riedel , Mikel Artetxe

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Jackson Harmon , Andreas Hochlehnert , Matthias Bethge , Ameya Prabhu

Incremental Learning (IL) has been a long-standing problem in both vision and Natural Language Processing (NLP) communities. In recent years, as Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in various NLP downstream…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-09 Junhao Zheng , Shengjie Qiu , Qianli Ma

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

Large language models (LLMs) often require vast amounts of text to effectively acquire new knowledge. While continuing pre-training on large corpora or employing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has proven successful, updating an LLM…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Hugo Abonizio , Thales Almeida , Roberto Lotufo , Rodrigo Nogueira

Memorization, or the tendency of large language models (LLMs) to output entire sequences from their training data verbatim, is a key concern for safely deploying language models. In particular, it is vital to minimize a model's memorization…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-02 Stella Biderman , USVSN Sai Prashanth , Lintang Sutawika , Hailey Schoelkopf , Quentin Anthony , Shivanshu Purohit , Edward Raff

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

Pre-trained models are nowadays a fundamental component of machine learning research. In continual learning, they are commonly used to initialize the model before training on the stream of non-stationary data. However, pre-training is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-20 Andrea Cossu , Tinne Tuytelaars , Antonio Carta , Lucia Passaro , Vincenzo Lomonaco , Davide Bacciu

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

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

The paper demonstrate that simple adjustments of the fine-tuning recipes of multimodal large language models (MLLM) are sufficient to mitigate catastrophic forgetting. On visual question answering, we design a 2x2 experimental framework to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-17 He Li , Yuhui Zhang , Xiaohan Wang , Kaifeng Lyu , Serena Yeung-Levy

Memorization in large language models (LLMs) makes them vulnerable to data extraction attacks. While pre-training memorization has been extensively studied, fewer works have explored its impact in fine-tuning, particularly for LoRA…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-27 Fei Wang , Baochun Li

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

Modelling a language model for a multi-lingual scenario includes several potential challenges, among which catastrophic forgetting is the major challenge. For example, small language models (SLM) built for low-resource languages by adapting…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-12 Santosh Srinath K , Mudit Somani , Varun Reddy Padala , Prajna Devi Upadhyay , Abhijit Das

Large language models (LLMs) with one or more fine-tuning phases have become a necessary step to unlock various capabilities, enabling LLMs to follow natural language instructions or align with human preferences. However, it carries the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-30 Tingfeng Hui , Zhenyu Zhang , Shuohuan Wang , Weiran Xu , Yu Sun , Hua Wu

Large Language Models (LLMs) are known to memorize portions of their training data, sometimes even reproduce content verbatim when prompted appropriately. Despite substantial interest, existing LLM memorization research has offered limited…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Yizhan Huang , Zhe Yang , Meifang Chen , Huang Nianchen , Jianping Zhang , Michael R. Lyu