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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

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

Continual learning (CL) refers to a machine learning paradigm that learns continuously without forgetting previously acquired knowledge. Thereby, major difficulty in CL is catastrophic forgetting of preceding tasks, caused by shifts in data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-08 Stella Ho , Ming Liu , Lan Du , Longxiang Gao , Yong Xiang

Catastrophic forgetting emerges as a critical challenge when fine-tuning multi-modal large language models (MLLMs), where improving performance on unseen tasks often leads to a significant performance drop on the original tasks. This paper…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Didi Zhu , Zhongyi Sun , Zexi Li , Tao Shen , Ke Yan , Shouhong Ding , Kun Kuang , Chao Wu

Given the prevalence of large language models (LLMs) and the prohibitive cost of training these models from scratch, dynamically forgetting specific knowledge e.g., private or proprietary, without retraining the model has become an…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-09 Tyler Lizzo , Larry Heck

Foundation Models (FMs) have become the hallmark of modern AI, however, these models are trained on massive data, leading to financially expensive training. Updating FMs as new data becomes available is important, however, can lead to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-22 James Seale Smith , Lazar Valkov , Shaunak Halbe , Vyshnavi Gutta , Rogerio Feris , Zsolt Kira , Leonid Karlinsky

Multimodal continual instruction tuning enables multimodal large language models to sequentially adapt to new tasks while building upon previously acquired knowledge. However, this continual learning paradigm faces the significant challenge…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Songze Li , Mingyu Gao , Tonghua Su , Xu-Yao Zhang , Zhongjie Wang

Continual learning, focused on sequentially learning multiple tasks, has gained significant attention recently. Despite the tremendous progress made in the past, the theoretical understanding, especially factors contributing to catastrophic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-29 Meng Ding , Kaiyi Ji , Di Wang , Jinhui Xu

The impressive capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have sparked debate over whether these models genuinely generalize to unseen tasks or predominantly rely on memorizing vast amounts of pretraining data. To explore this issue, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Xinyi Wang , Antonis Antoniades , Yanai Elazar , Alfonso Amayuelas , Alon Albalak , Kexun Zhang , William Yang Wang

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

We introduce Speech-IFeval, an evaluation framework designed to assess instruction-following capabilities and quantify catastrophic forgetting in speech-aware language models (SLMs). Recent SLMs integrate speech perception with large…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-05-27 Ke-Han Lu , Chun-Yi Kuan , Hung-yi Lee

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

Modern language models are powerful, but typically static after deployment. A major obstacle to building models that continually learn over time is catastrophic forgetting, where updating on new data erases previously acquired capabilities.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Jessy Lin , Luke Zettlemoyer , Gargi Ghosh , Wen-Tau Yih , Aram Markosyan , Vincent-Pierre Berges , Barlas Oğuz

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable generative capabilities but raise ethical and security concerns by memorizing sensitive data, reinforcing biases, and producing harmful content. These risks have spurred interest in LLM…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Changsheng Wang , Yihua Zhang , Dennis Wei , Jinghan Jia , Pin-Yu Chen , Sijia Liu

Representation forgetting refers to the drift of contextualized representations during continual training. Intuitively, the representation forgetting can influence the general knowledge stored in pre-trained language models (LMs), but the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-11 Yun Luo , Zhen Yang , Xuefeng Bai , Fandong Meng , Jie Zhou , Yue Zhang

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Guangliang Liu , Milad Afshari , Xitong Zhang , Zhiyu Xue , Avrajit Ghosh , Bidhan Bashyal , Rongrong Wang , Kristen Johnson

Continual Learning (CL) focuses on maximizing the predictive performance of a model across a non-stationary stream of data. Unfortunately, CL models tend to forget previous knowledge, thus often underperforming when compared with an offline…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-15 Lanpei Li , Elia Piccoli , Andrea Cossu , Davide Bacciu , Vincenzo Lomonaco

Recently, foundation language models (LMs) have marked significant achievements in the domains of natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV). Unlike traditional neural network models, foundation LMs obtain a great ability…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-02 Yutao Yang , Jie Zhou , Xuanwen Ding , Tianyu Huai , Shunyu Liu , Qin Chen , Yuan Xie , Liang He

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

In this paper, we show that when spoken language models (SLMs) are instructed to speak in a specific speaking style at the beginning of a multi-turn conversation, they cannot maintain the required speaking styles after several turns of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Yu-Xiang Lin , Cheng-Han Chiang , Hung-yi Lee