English
Related papers

Related papers: Spurious Forgetting in Continual Learning of Langu…

200 papers

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of tasks, yet they also exhibit memorization of their training data. This phenomenon raises critical questions about model behavior, privacy risks,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-15 Alexander Xiong , Xuandong Zhao , Aneesh Pappu , Dawn Song

Large Language Models (LLMs) deployed in real-world settings increasingly face the need to unlearn sensitive, outdated, or proprietary information. Existing unlearning methods typically formulate forgetting and retention as a regularized…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Taha Entesari , Arman Hatami , Rinat Khaziev , Anil Ramakrishna , Mahyar Fazlyab

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance on a series of natural language understanding tasks. However, these LLMs might rely on dataset bias and artifacts as shortcuts for prediction. This has significantly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-09 Mengnan Du , Fengxiang He , Na Zou , Dacheng Tao , Xia Hu

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

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

Continual Learning (CL) is a field dedicated to devise algorithms able to achieve lifelong learning. Overcoming the knowledge disruption of previously acquired concepts, a drawback affecting deep learning models and that goes by the name of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-01-04 Francesco Pelosin

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) is intended to improve their reasoning capabilities, yet we uncover a counterintuitive effect: models often forget how to solve problems they previously answered correctly during training. We term…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Yuetai Li , Zhangchen Xu , Fengqing Jiang , Bhaskar Ramasubramanian , Luyao Niu , Bill Yuchen Lin , Xiang Yue , Radha Poovendran

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

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is a critical step for enhancing the instruction-following capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) and adapting them to specialized domains. However, SFT often leads to a degradation of the model's general…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Fei Ding , Baiqiao Wang

Multimodal Continual Instruction Tuning (MCIT) aims to enable Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to incrementally learn new tasks without catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, we explore forgetting in this context, categorizing it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-06 Jinpeng Chen , Runmin Cong , Yuzhi Zhao , Hongzheng Yang , Guangneng Hu , Horace Ho Shing Ip , Sam Kwong

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

In this paper, we investigate knowledge forgetting in large language models with a focus on its generalisation, ensuring that models forget not only specific training samples but also related implicit knowledge. To this end, we begin by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Huazheng Wang , Yongcheng Jing , Haifeng Sun , Yingjie Wang , Jingyu Wang , Jianxin Liao , Dacheng Tao

Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across a wide range of tasks, growing concerns have emerged over the misuse of sensitive, copyrighted, or harmful data during training. To address these…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Jie Ren , Zhenwei Dai , Xianfeng Tang , Yue Xing , Shenglai Zeng , Hui Liu , Jingying Zeng , Qiankun Peng , Samarth Varshney , Suhang Wang , Qi He , Charu C. Aggarwal , Hui Liu

This paper considers continual learning of large-scale pretrained neural machine translation model without accessing the previous training data or introducing model separation. We argue that the widely used regularization-based methods,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-11-07 Shuhao Gu , Bojie Hu , Yang Feng

Previous studies on continual knowledge learning (CKL) in large language models (LLMs) have predominantly focused on approaches such as regularization, architectural modifications, and rehearsal techniques to mitigate catastrophic…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-06 Yeongbin Seo , Dongha Lee , Jinyoung Yeo

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

Continual learning (CL) is a setting in which an agent has to learn from an incoming stream of data sequentially. CL performance evaluates the model's ability to continually learn and solve new problems with incremental available…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-04 Josh Andle , Salimeh Yasaei Sekeh

Large Language Models (LLMs) based on the pre-trained fine-tuning paradigm have become pivotal in solving natural language processing tasks, consistently achieving state-of-the-art performance. Nevertheless, the theoretical understanding of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-02 Jing Luo , Huiyuan Wang , Weiran Huang

Catastrophic forgetting describes the fact that machine learning models will likely forget the knowledge of previously learned tasks after the learning process of a new one. It is a vital problem in the continual learning scenario and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-25 Wenjie Jiang , Zhide Lu , Dong-Ling Deng

Despite the remarkable capabilities of modern large language models (LLMs), the mechanisms behind their problem-solving abilities remain elusive. In this work, we aim to better understand how the learning dynamics of LLM finetuning shapes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Katie Kang , Amrith Setlur , Dibya Ghosh , Jacob Steinhardt , Claire Tomlin , Sergey Levine , Aviral Kumar