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Related papers: Context-Free Synthetic Data Mitigates Forgetting

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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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Parjanya Prajakta Prashant , Jiongli Zhu , Aldan Creo , Babak Salimi

Reasoning models enhance problem-solving by scaling test-time compute, yet they face a critical paradox: excessive thinking tokens often degrade performance rather than improve it. We attribute this to a fundamental architectural flaw:…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Yilun Zheng , Dongyang Ma , Tian Liang , Jiahao Xu , Xinting Huang , Lihui Chen , Haitao Mi , Yan Wang

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

Compute scaling for language model (LM) pretraining has outpaced the growth of human-written texts, leading to concerns that data will become the bottleneck to LM scaling. To continue scaling pretraining in this data-constrained regime, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Yangjun Ruan , Neil Band , Chris J. Maddison , Tatsunori Hashimoto

Recently, dataset-generation-based zero-shot learning has shown promising results by training a task-specific model with a dataset synthesized from large pre-trained language models (PLMs). The final task-specific model often achieves…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Jiacheng Ye , Jiahui Gao , Jiangtao Feng , Zhiyong Wu , Tao Yu , Lingpeng Kong

In this paper, we explore the challenging problem of performing a generative task in a target language when labeled data is only available in English, using summarization as a case study. We assume a strict setting with no access to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Tu Vu , Aditya Barua , Brian Lester , Daniel Cer , Mohit Iyyer , Noah Constant

Catastrophic forgetting is a significant challenge in continual learning, in which a model loses prior knowledge when it is fine-tuned on new tasks. This problem is particularly critical for large language models (LLMs) undergoing continual…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Ege Süalp , Mina Rezaei

Finetuning pretrained models on downstream generation tasks often leads to catastrophic forgetting in zero-shot conditions. In this work, we focus on summarization and tackle the problem through the lens of language-independent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-09 Vladimir Solovyev , Danni Liu , Jan Niehues

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Anh Pham , Mihir Thalanki , Michael Sun , Aditya Chaloo , Ankita Gupta , Tian Xia , Aditya Mate , Ehimwenma Nosakhare , Soundararajan Srinivasan

Maintaining consistent model performance across domains is a fundamental challenge in machine learning. While recent work has explored using LLM-generated data for fine-tuning, its impact on cross-domain generalization remains poorly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-12 Chao-Chung Wu , Zhi Rui Tam , Chieh-Yen Lin , Yun-Nung Chen , Shao-Hua Sun , Hung-yi Lee

Pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) require post-training methods such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on instruction-response pairs to enable instruction following. However, this process can potentially harm existing capabilities…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Yihan Wang , Andrew Bai , Nanyun Peng , Cho-Jui Hsieh

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

The ability of large language models (LLMs) to process and reason over long textual inputs is critical for a wide range of real-world applications. However, progress in this area is significantly constrained by the absence of high-quality,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-05 Seganrasan Subramanian , Abhigya Verma

The utility of synthetic data to enhance pretraining data quality and hence to improve downstream task accuracy has been widely explored in recent large language models (LLMs). Yet, these approaches fall inadequate in complex, multi-hop and…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have garnered widespread attention due to their remarkable performance across various tasks. However, to mitigate the issue of hallucinations, LLMs often incorporate retrieval-augmented pipeline to provide them…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-29 Haowen Hou , Fei Ma , Binwen Bai , Xinxin Zhu , Fei Yu

Language Models (LMs) can perform new tasks by adapting to a few in-context examples. For humans, explanations that connect examples to task principles can improve learning. We therefore investigate whether explanations of few-shot examples…

Large language models (LLMs) achieved remarkable performance across various tasks. However, they face challenges in managing long documents and extended conversations, due to significantly increased computational requirements, both in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-11 Yucheng Li , Bo Dong , Chenghua Lin , Frank Guerin

Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP), particularly in Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks. As we progress toward an agentic world where LLM-based agents autonomously handle…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-03 Naimul Haque

Large language models exhibit remarkable performance across diverse tasks through pre-training and fine-tuning paradigms. However, continual fine-tuning on sequential tasks induces catastrophic forgetting, where newly acquired knowledge…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Olaf Yunus Laitinen Imanov

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable proficiency across various tasks. Given the potent applications of LLMs in numerous fields, there has been a surge in LLM development. In developing LLMs, a common…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-09 Chen-An Li , Hung-Yi Lee