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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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-30 Sanket Vaibhav Mehta , Darshan Patil , Sarath Chandar , Emma Strubell

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Xisen Jin , Xiang Ren

Large language models often fail to satisfy formatting instructions when they must simultaneously perform demanding tasks. We study this behaviour through a prospective memory inspired lens from cognitive psychology, using a controlled…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Avni Mittal

Catastrophic forgetting is a pervasive issue for pre-trained language models (PLMs) during continual learning, where models lose previously acquired knowledge when sequentially trained on a series of tasks. The model's ability to retain old…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Biqing Zeng , Zehan Li , Aladdin Ayesh

Real-life multilingual systems should be able to efficiently incorporate new languages as data distributions fed to the system evolve and shift over time. To do this, systems need to handle the issue of catastrophic forgetting, where the…

Language models deployed in the wild make errors. However, simply updating the model with the corrected error instances causes catastrophic forgetting -- the updated model makes errors on instances learned during the instruction tuning or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-11 Xisen Jin , Xiang Ren

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) has emerged as a common practice for tailoring models to individual needs and preferences. The choice of datasets for fine-tuning can be diverse, introducing safety concerns regarding the potential…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Hyeong Kyu Choi , Xuefeng Du , Yixuan Li

Catastrophic forgetting remains a major challenge when fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on narrow, task-specific data, often degrading their general knowledge and reasoning abilities. We propose SA-SFT, a lightweight…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Yutao Sun , Mingshuai Chen , Tiancheng Zhao , Phillip Miao , Zilun Zhang , Haozhan Shen , Ruizhe Zhu , Jianwei Yin

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit strong general language capabilities. However, fine-tuning these models on domain-specific tasks often leads to catastrophic forgetting, where the model overwrites or loses essential knowledge acquired…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Shezheng Song , Hao Xu , Jun Ma , Shasha Li , Long Peng , Qian Wan , Xiaodong Liu , Jie Yu

Currently used semantic parsing systems deployed in voice assistants can require weeks to train. Datasets for these models often receive small and frequent updates, data patches. Each patch requires training a new model. To reduce training…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-03-23 Vladislav Lialin , Rahul Goel , Andrey Simanovsky , Anna Rumshisky , Rushin Shah

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

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

We are motivated primarily by the adaptation of text-to-speech synthesis models; however we argue that more generic parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) is an appropriate framework to do such adaptation. Nevertheless, catastrophic…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-12-10 Haolin Chen , Philip N. Garner

Catastrophic forgetting remains a formidable obstacle to building an omniscient model in large language models (LLMs). Despite the pioneering research on task-level forgetting in LLM fine-tuning, there is scant focus on forgetting during…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Chonghua Liao , Ruobing Xie , Xingwu Sun , Haowen Sun , Zhanhui Kang

As open-weight large language models (LLMs) achieve ever more impressive performances across a wide range of tasks in English, practitioners aim to adapt these models to different languages. However, such language adaptation is often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-17 Anton Alexandrov , Veselin Raychev , Mark Niklas Müller , Ce Zhang , Martin Vechev , Kristina Toutanova

When language models (LMs) are trained to forget (or "unlearn'') a skill, how precisely does their behavior change? We study the behavior of transformer LMs in which tasks have been forgotten via fine-tuning on randomized labels. Such LMs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-05 Eric Zhang , Leshem Chosen , Jacob Andreas

Large language models may encode sensitive information or outdated knowledge that needs to be removed, to ensure responsible and compliant model responses. Unlearning has emerged as an efficient alternative to full retraining, aiming to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Yuefeng Peng , Parnian Afshar , Megan Ganji , Thomas Butler , Amir Houmansadr , Mingxian Wang , Dezhi Hong

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

Language model fine-tuning is essential for modern natural language processing, but is computationally expensive and time-consuming. Further, the effectiveness of fine-tuning is limited by the inclusion of training examples that negatively…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-05-23 Richard Antonello , Nicole Beckage , Javier Turek , Alexander Huth

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