Related papers: Forgetting in Language Models: Capacity, Optimizat…

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…

The training of modern large language models (LLMs) takes place in a regime where most training examples are seen only a few times by the model during the course of training. What does a model remember about such examples seen only a few…

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…

Deep pretrained language models have achieved great success in the way of pretraining first and then fine-tuning. But such a sequential transfer learning paradigm often confronts the catastrophic forgetting problem and leads to sub-optimal…

The impressive capability of modern text-to-image models to generate realistic visuals has come with a serious drawback: they can be misused to create harmful, deceptive or unlawful content. This has accelerated the push for machine…

Memorization in language models is typically treated as a homogenous phenomenon, neglecting the specifics of the memorized data. We instead model memorization as the effect of a set of complex factors that describe each sample and relate it…

Machine learning models exhibit two seemingly contradictory phenomena: training data memorization, and various forms of forgetting. In memorization, models overfit specific training examples and become susceptible to privacy attacks. In…

In many real-world scenarios, data to train machine learning models becomes available over time. Unfortunately, these models struggle to continually learn new concepts without forgetting what has been learnt in the past. This phenomenon is…

Human memory is fleeting. As words are processed, the exact wordforms that make up incoming sentences are rapidly lost. Cognitive scientists have long believed that this limitation of memory may, paradoxically, help in learning language -…

Lifelong learning requires models that can continuously learn from sequential streams of data without suffering catastrophic forgetting due to shifts in data distributions. Deep learning models have thrived in the non-sequential learning…

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…

Adapting pre-trained models to specialized tasks often leads to catastrophic forgetting, where new knowledge overwrites foundational capabilities. Existing methods either compromise performance on the new task or struggle to balance…

The ability of machine learning models to store input information in hidden layer vector embeddings, analogous to the concept of `memory', is widely employed but not well characterized. We find that language model embeddings typically…

Fine-tuning multilingual foundation models on specific languages often induces catastrophic forgetting, degrading performance on languages unseen in fine-tuning. While this phenomenon is widely-documented, the literature presents fragmented…

Replaying past experiences has proven to be a highly effective approach for averting catastrophic forgetting in supervised continual learning. However, some crucial factors are still largely ignored, making it vulnerable to serious failure,…

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…

Continual learning is a long-standing challenge in robot policy learning, where a policy must acquire new skills over time without catastrophically forgetting previously learned ones. While prior work has extensively studied continual…

As scaling laws push the training of frontier large language models (LLMs) toward ever-growing data requirements, training pipelines are approaching a regime where much of the publicly available online text may be consumed. At the same…

Large language models (LMs) have been shown to memorize parts of their training data, and when prompted appropriately, they will emit the memorized training data verbatim. This is undesirable because memorization violates privacy (exposing…

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…