Related papers: A Quantitative Characterization of Forgetting in P…

Scaled post-training now drives many of the largest capability gains in language models (LMs), yet its effect on pretrained knowledge remains poorly understood. Not all forgetting is equal: Forgetting one fact (e.g., a U.S. president or an…

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…

We identify a phenomenon, which we refer to as multi-model forgetting, that occurs when sequentially training multiple deep networks with partially-shared parameters; the performance of previously-trained models degrades as one optimizes a…

Post-training algorithms such as Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) are widely used to adapt (multimodal) large language models to downstream tasks. While effective at task adaptation, their impact on retaining…

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…

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,…

We show that the influence of a subset of the training samples can be removed -- or "forgotten" -- from the weights of a network trained on large-scale image classification tasks, and we provide strong computable bounds on the amount of…

Continual learning (CL) aims to train models on a sequence of tasks while retaining performance on previously learned ones. A core challenge in this setting is catastrophic forgetting, where new learning interferes with past knowledge.…

Evolution Strategies (ES) has recently emerged as a competitive alternative to reinforcement learning (RL) for large language model (LLM) fine-tuning, offering advantages through simplicity, scalability, and inference-only training.…

Large language model (LLM) post-training enhances latent skills, unlocks value alignment, improves performance, and enables domain adaptation. Unfortunately, post-training is known to induce forgetting, especially in the ubiquitous use-case…

End-to-end training of Spoken Language Models (SLMs) commonly involves adapting pre-trained text-based Large Language Models (LLMs) to the speech modality through multi-stage training on diverse tasks such as ASR, TTS and spoken question…

Connectionist models such as neural networks suffer from catastrophic forgetting. In this work, we study this problem from the perspective of information theory and define forgetting as the increase of description lengths of previous data…

The ability of intelligent agents to learn and remember multiple tasks sequentially is crucial to achieving artificial general intelligence. Many continual learning (CL) methods have been proposed to overcome catastrophic forgetting which…

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…

Continual learning (CL) refers to a machine learning paradigm that learns continuously without forgetting previously acquired knowledge. Thereby, major difficulty in CL is catastrophic forgetting of preceding tasks, caused by shifts in data…

How can we teach large multimodal models (LMMs) new skills without erasing prior abilities? We study sequential fine-tuning on five target skills while monitoring general ability on eight held-out benchmarks across three model families.…

Foundation Models (FMs) have become the hallmark of modern AI, however, these models are trained on massive data, leading to financially expensive training. Updating FMs as new data becomes available is important, however, can lead to…

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a common first stage of LLM post-training, teaching the model to follow instructions and shaping its behavior as a helpful assistant. At the same time, SFT may harm the fundamental capabilities of an LLM,…

The paper demonstrate that simple adjustments of the fine-tuning recipes of multimodal large language models (MLLM) are sufficient to mitigate catastrophic forgetting. On visual question answering, we design a 2x2 experimental framework to…

It is commonly believed that optimizing the reverse KL divergence results in "mode seeking", while optimizing forward KL results in "mass covering", with the latter being preferred if the goal is to sample from multiple diverse modes. We…