Related papers: Upweighting Easy Samples in Fine-Tuning Mitigates …

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…

A large obstacle to deploying deep learning models in practice is the process of updating models post-deployment (ideally, frequently). Deep neural networks can cost many thousands of dollars to train. When new data comes in the pipeline,…

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…

In continual learning, where task data arrives in a sequence, fine-tuning on later tasks will often lead to performance degradation on earlier tasks. This is especially pronounced when these tasks come from diverse domains. In this setting,…

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…

Fine-tuning is a widespread technique that allows practitioners to transfer pre-trained capabilities, as recently showcased by the successful applications of foundation models. However, fine-tuning reinforcement learning (RL) models remains…

Fine-tuning multilingual foundation models on specific languages often induces catastrophic forgetting, degrading performance on languages unseen in fine-tuning. While this phenomenon is widely-documented, the literature presents fragmented…

Pretraining large language models (LLMs) on vast and heterogeneous datasets is crucial for achieving state-of-the-art performance across diverse downstream tasks. However, current training paradigms treat all samples equally, overlooking…

Pre-trained foundation models, due to their enormous capacity and exposure to vast amounts of data during pre-training, are known to have learned plenty of real-world concepts. An important step in making these pre-trained models effective…

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…

Finetuning a pretrained model has become a standard approach for training neural networks on novel tasks, resulting in fast convergence and improved performance. In this work, we study an alternative finetuning method, where instead of…

Large language models often lose previously aligned safety behaviors when fine-tuned on benign data, a phenomenon known as catastrophic forgetting. Prior work shows that adding random safety examples can mitigate this effect, but it remains…

Adapting pre-trained models to specialized tasks often leads to catastrophic forgetting, where new knowledge overwrites foundational capabilities. Existing methods either compromise performance on the new task or struggle to balance…

In this paper, we consider the problem of fine-grained image retrieval in an incremental setting, when new categories are added over time. On the one hand, repeatedly training the representation on the extended dataset is time-consuming. On…

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…

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for downstream tasks often leads to catastrophic forgetting, notably degrading the safety of originally aligned models. While some existing methods attempt to restore safety by incorporating…

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,…

Incrementally fine-tuning foundational models on new tasks or domains is now the de facto approach in NLP. A known pitfall of this approach is the \emph{catastrophic forgetting} of prior knowledge that happens during fine-tuning. A common…

Fine-tuning large language models on new data improves task performance but degrades capabilities learned during pretraining, a phenomenon known as catastrophic forgetting. Existing methods mitigate this by modifying the fine-tuning…

Continual learning seeks to enable machine learning systems to solve an increasing corpus of tasks sequentially. A critical challenge for continual learning is forgetting, where the performance on previously learned tasks decreases as new…