Related papers: Forgetting in Language Models: Capacity, Optimizat…
Continual learning seeks to enable machine learning systems to solve an increasing corpus of tasks sequentially. A critical challenge for continual learning is forgetting, where the performance on previously learned tasks decreases as new…
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…
Large pre-trained language models help to achieve state of the art on a variety of natural language processing (NLP) tasks, nevertheless, they still suffer from forgetting when incrementally learning a sequence of tasks. To alleviate this…
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…
Memory is one of the most essential cognitive functions serving as a repository of world knowledge and episodes of activities. In recent years, large-scale pre-trained language models have shown remarkable memorizing ability. On the…
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…
Pretrained language models (PLMs) are today the primary model for natural language processing. Despite their impressive downstream performance, it can be difficult to apply PLMs to new languages, a barrier to making their capabilities…
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…
Replay in neural networks involves training on sequential data with memorized samples, which counteracts forgetting of previous behavior caused by non-stationarity. We present a method where these auxiliary samples are generated on the fly,…
Continual learning is the problem of learning new tasks or knowledge while protecting old knowledge and ideally generalizing from old experience to learn new tasks faster. Neural networks trained by stochastic gradient descent often degrade…
Although substantial efforts have been made to mitigate catastrophic forgetting in continual learning, the intrinsic mechanisms are not well understood. In this work, we demonstrate the existence of "pseudo forgetting": the performance…
Continual learning -- the ability to acquire knowledge incrementally without forgetting previous skills -- is fundamental to natural intelligence. While the human brain excels at this, artificial neural networks struggle with "catastrophic…
As new knowledge rapidly accumulates, language models (LMs) with pretrained knowledge quickly become obsolete. A common approach to updating LMs is fine-tuning them directly on new knowledge. However, recent studies have shown that…
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…
Modern Neural Machine Translation systems exhibit strong performance in several different languages and are constantly improving. Their ability to learn continuously is, however, still severely limited by the catastrophic forgetting issue.…
Neural networks suffer from catastrophic forgetting and are unable to sequentially learn new tasks without guaranteed stationarity in data distribution. Continual learning could be achieved via replay -- by concurrently training externally…
Continual Learning research typically focuses on tackling the phenomenon of catastrophic forgetting in neural networks. Catastrophic forgetting is associated with an abrupt loss of knowledge previously learned by a model when the task, or…
Pre-trained models are nowadays a fundamental component of machine learning research. In continual learning, they are commonly used to initialize the model before training on the stream of non-stationary data. However, pre-training is…
State-of-the-art pre-trained language models have been shown to memorise facts and perform well with limited amounts of training data. To gain a better understanding of how these models learn, we study their generalisation and memorisation…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are often evaluated against ideals of perfect Bayesian inference, yet growing evidence suggests that their in-context reasoning exhibits systematic forgetting of past information. Rather than viewing this…