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Catastrophic Forgetting (CF) means models forgetting previously acquired knowledge when learning new data. It compromises the effectiveness of large language models (LLMs) during fine-tuning, yet the underlying causes have not been…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-10 Hongyu Li , Liang Ding , Meng Fang , Dacheng Tao

Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) reasoning have been largely attributed to the rise of reinforcement Learning (RL), which has shifted the community's focus away from the supervised fine-tuning (SFT) paradigm. Many studies…

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) frequently induces catastrophic forgetting of prior capabilities. Recent work has shown that reinforcement learning (RL) retains prior capabilities more effectively than supervised fine-tuning (SFT),…

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

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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Howard Chen , Noam Razin , Karthik Narasimhan , Danqi Chen

In recent years, continual learning with pre-training (CLPT) has received widespread interest, instead of its traditional focus of training from scratch. The use of strong pre-trained models (PTMs) can greatly facilitate knowledge transfer…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-08-16 Gengwei Zhang , Liyuan Wang , Guoliang Kang , Ling Chen , Yunchao Wei

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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Jackson Harmon , Andreas Hochlehnert , Matthias Bethge , Ameya Prabhu

Reinforcement learning (RL) has proven effective in incentivizing the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs), but suffers from severe efficiency challenges due to its trial-and-error nature. While the common practice employs…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Liang Chen , Xueting Han , Li Shen , Jing Bai , Kam-Fai Wong

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-30 Thomas Schmied , Markus Hofmarcher , Fabian Paischer , Razvan Pascanu , Sepp Hochreiter

Post-training has demonstrated its importance in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). The primary post-training methods can be categorized into supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement fine-tuning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Mingyang Liu , Gabriele Farina , Asuman Ozdaglar

Pretraining language models on large text corpora is a common practice in natural language processing. Fine-tuning of these models is then performed to achieve the best results on a variety of tasks. In this paper, we investigate the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-03 Philip Kenneweg , Alexander Schulz , Sarah Schröder , Barbara Hammer

Recent advances in large language model (LLM) reasoning have shown that sophisticated behaviors such as planning and self-reflection can emerge through reinforcement learning (RL). However, despite these successes, RL in its current form…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-12 Lu Ma , Hao Liang , Meiyi Qiang , Lexiang Tang , Xiaochen Ma , Zhen Hao Wong , Junbo Niu , Chengyu Shen , Runming He , Yanhao Li , Bin Cui , Wentao Zhang

Machine Unlearning (MU) enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to remove unsafe or outdated information. However, existing work assumes that all facts are equally forgettable and largely ignores whether the forgotten knowledge originates from…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Borisiuk Anna , Andrey Savchenko , Alexander Panchenko , Elena Tutubalina

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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Lukas Thede , Stefan Winzeck , Zeynep Akata , Jonathan Richard Schwarz

When using supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to adapt large language models (LLMs) to specific domains, a significant challenge arises: should we use the entire SFT dataset for fine-tuning? Common practice often involves fine-tuning directly on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Xiang Liu , Zhaoxiang Liu , Peng Wang , Kohou Wang , Huan Hu , Kai Wang , Shiguo Lian

LLMs' performance on complex tasks is still unsatisfactory. A key issue is that presently LLMs learn in a data-driven schema, while the instructions about these complex tasks are both scarce and hard to collect or construct. On the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-21 Yang Zhao , Li Du , Xiao Ding , Kai Xiong , Ting Liu , Bing Qin

Optimizers play an important role in both pretraining and finetuning stages when training large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we present an observation that full finetuning with the same optimizer as in pretraining achieves a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Yuxing Liu , Jianyu Wang , Tong Zhang