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Despite the increasing prevalence of large language models (LLMs), we still have a limited understanding of how their representational spaces are structured. This limits our ability to interpret how and what they learn or relate them to…

Deep learning models are known to overfit and memorize spurious features in the training dataset. While numerous empirical studies have aimed at understanding this phenomenon, a rigorous theoretical framework to quantify it is still…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-20 Simone Bombari , Marco Mondelli

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

Recent advancements in Artificial Intelligence have led to the development of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). However, adapting these pre-trained models to dynamic data distributions and various tasks efficiently remains a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Yukang Huo , Hao Tang

Large language models (LLMs) suffer from forgetting of upstream knowledge when fine-tuned. Despite efforts on mitigating forgetting, few have investigated how forgotten upstream examples are dependent on newly learned tasks. Insights on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Xisen Jin , Xiang Ren

Continual learning studies how models can adapt to new tasks while retaining previously acquired knowledge. Although a broad spectrum of methods has been proposed to mitigate catastrophic forgetting, the field remains predominantly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Katarzyna Filus , Kamil Faber , Roberto Corizzo , Christopher Kanan

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

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

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Zhiwen Ruan , Yun Chen , Yutao Hou , Peng Li , Yang Liu , Guanhua Chen

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

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

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

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a common first stage of LLM post-training, teaching the model to follow instructions and shaping its behavior as a helpful assistant. At the same time, SFT may harm the fundamental capabilities of an LLM,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Mark Rofin , Aditya Varre , Nicolas Flammarion

Large language models often fail to satisfy formatting instructions when they must simultaneously perform demanding tasks. We study this behaviour through a prospective memory inspired lens from cognitive psychology, using a controlled…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Avni Mittal

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

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

Large language models (LLMs) store vast amounts of knowledge, which often requires updates to correct factual errors, incorporate newly acquired information, or adapt model behavior. Model editing methods have emerged as efficient solutions…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Fufang Wen , Shichang Zhang

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) are trained for downstream tasks by updating their parameters (e.g., via RL). However, updating parameters forces them to absorb task-specific information, which can result in catastrophic forgetting and loss of…

Training large language representation models has become a standard in the natural language processing community. This allows for fine tuning on any number of specific tasks, however, these large high capacity models can continue to train…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-04-09 Kristjan Arumae , Parminder Bhatia