English
Related papers

Related papers: Graceful Forgetting in Generative Language Models

200 papers

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

As the landscape of large language models expands, efficiently finetuning for specific tasks becomes increasingly crucial. At the same time, the landscape of parameter-efficient finetuning methods rapidly expands. Consequently,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Tobias Strangmann , Lennart Purucker , Jörg K. H. Franke , Ivo Rapant , Fabio Ferreira , Frank Hutter

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

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) reveal a perplexing phenomenon in continual learning: despite extensive training, models experience significant performance declines, raising questions about task alignment and underlying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-24 Junhao Zheng , Xidi Cai , Shengjie Qiu , Qianli Ma

Catastrophic forgetting (CF) happens whenever a neural network overwrites past knowledge while being trained on new tasks. Common techniques to handle CF include regularization of the weights (using, e.g., their importance on past tasks),…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-29 Jary Pomponi , Simone Scardapane , Aurelio Uncini

The power of foundation models (FMs) lies in their capacity to learn highly expressive representations that can be adapted to a broad spectrum of tasks. However, these pretrained models require additional training stages to become effective…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Jacob L. Block , Sundararajan Srinivasan , Liam Collins , Aryan Mokhtari , Sanjay Shakkottai

Continual adaptation of deep generative models holds tremendous potential and critical importance, given their rapid and expanding usage in text and vision based applications. Incremental training, however, remains highly challenging due to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Victor Enescu , Hichem Sahbi

The fine-tuning of pre-trained language models has a great success in many NLP fields. Yet, it is strikingly vulnerable to adversarial examples, e.g., word substitution attacks using only synonyms can easily fool a BERT-based sentiment…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-12-23 Xinhsuai Dong , Luu Anh Tuan , Min Lin , Shuicheng Yan , Hanwang Zhang

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

Pretrained Foundation Models (PFMs) have transformed numerous applications by enabling efficient adaptation to customized tasks. Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) has emerged as a resource-efficient alternative to full fine-tuning,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-16 Baoquan Zhang , Guangning Xu , Michael. K. Ng

Forgetting refers to the loss or deterioration of previously acquired knowledge. While existing surveys on forgetting have primarily focused on continual learning, forgetting is a prevalent phenomenon observed in various other research…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Zhenyi Wang , Enneng Yang , Li Shen , Heng Huang

Catastrophic forgetting (CF) happens whenever a neural network overwrites past knowledge while being trained on new tasks. Common techniques to handle CF include regularization of the weights (using, e.g., their importance on past tasks),…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-08-06 Jary Pomponi , Simone Scardapane , Aurelio Uncini

Large language models (LLMs) with one or more fine-tuning phases have become a necessary step to unlock various capabilities, enabling LLMs to follow natural language instructions or align with human preferences. However, it carries the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-30 Tingfeng Hui , Zhenyu Zhang , Shuohuan Wang , Weiran Xu , Yu Sun , Hua Wu

Large language models (LLMs) are often fine-tuned for use on downstream tasks, though this can degrade capabilities learned during previous training. This phenomenon, often referred to as catastrophic forgetting, has important potential…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-30 Megan Ung , Alicia Sun , Samuel J. Bell , Bhaktipriya Radharapu , Levent Sagun , Adina Williams

We introduce a new method for internal replay that modulates the frequency of rehearsal based on the depth of the network. While replay strategies mitigate the effects of catastrophic forgetting in neural networks, recent works on…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-07-07 Stanisław Pawlak , Filip Szatkowski , Michał Bortkiewicz , Jan Dubiński , Tomasz Trzciński

A key stepping stone in the development of an artificial general intelligence (a machine that can perform any task), is the production of agents that can perform multiple tasks at once instead of just one. Unfortunately, canonical methods…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2019-04-08 Joseph Early

This work investigates the entanglement between Continual Learning (CL) and Transfer Learning (TL). In particular, we shed light on the widespread application of network pretraining, highlighting that it is itself subject to catastrophic…

Large Language Models (LLMs), pre-trained on massive text corpora, exhibit remarkable human-level language understanding, reasoning, and decision-making abilities. However, they tend to memorize unwanted information, such as private or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Xiangyu Zhou , Yao Qiang , Saleh Zare Zade , Douglas Zytko , Prashant Khanduri , Dongxiao Zhu

Fine-tuning Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) on task-specific data is an effective way to improve performance on downstream applications. However, such adaptation often leads to a degradation in generalization on pretrained tasks, a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Hyeontaek Hwang , Nguyen Dinh Son , Daeyoung Kim

Generative foundation models are susceptible to implicit biases that can arise from extensive unsupervised training data. Such biases can produce suboptimal samples, skewed outcomes, and unfairness, with potentially serious consequences.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-04 Hanze Dong , Wei Xiong , Deepanshu Goyal , Yihan Zhang , Winnie Chow , Rui Pan , Shizhe Diao , Jipeng Zhang , Kashun Shum , Tong Zhang