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Models for learning probability distributions such as generative models and density estimators behave quite differently from models for learning functions. One example is found in the memorization phenomenon, namely the ultimate convergence…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-03-03 Hongkang Yang , Weinan E

It takes several years for the developing brain of a baby to fully master word repetition-the task of hearing a word and repeating it aloud. Repeating a new word, such as from a new language, can be a challenging task also for adults.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Daniel Dager , Robin Sobczyk , Emmanuel Chemla , Yair Lakretz

In Continual Learning, a Neural Network is trained on a stream of data whose distribution shifts over time. Under these assumptions, it is especially challenging to improve on classes appearing later in the stream while remaining accurate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-13 Pietro Buzzega , Matteo Boschini , Angelo Porrello , Simone Calderara

Replay methods are known to be successful at mitigating catastrophic forgetting in continual learning scenarios despite having limited access to historical data. However, storing historical data is cheap in many real-world settings, yet…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-22 Marcus Klasson , Hedvig Kjellström , Cheng Zhang

A central challenge in developing versatile machine learning systems is catastrophic forgetting: a model trained on tasks in sequence will suffer significant performance drops on earlier tasks. Despite the ubiquity of catastrophic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-16 Vinay V. Ramasesh , Ethan Dyer , Maithra Raghu

Large language models (LLMs) excel on a variety of reasoning benchmarks, but previous studies suggest they sometimes struggle to generalize to unseen questions, potentially due to over-reliance on memorized training examples. However, the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-01 Yihuai Hong , Dian Zhou , Meng Cao , Lei Yu , Zhijing Jin

At computer modeling of process of training it is usually supposed that all elements of a training material are forgotten with an identical speed. But in practice that knowledge which are included in educational activity of the pupil are…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2014-01-14 Robert V. Mayer

Large language models are highly capable of answering difficult questions by retrieving, recombining, and attending to information in long contexts. For agentic tasks, an additional capability is required: the preservation of an exact state…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Tianxiang Dai , Jonathan Fan

We propose a new method for estimating how much a model knows about a datapoint and use it to measure the capacity of modern language models. Prior studies of language model memorization have struggled to disentangle memorization from…

When building a unified vision system or gradually adding new capabilities to a system, the usual assumption is that training data for all tasks is always available. However, as the number of tasks grows, storing and retraining on such data…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2017-02-16 Zhizhong Li , Derek Hoiem

Large language models have achieved remarkable success in various tasks. However, it is challenging for them to learn new tasks incrementally due to catastrophic forgetting. Existing approaches rely on experience replay, optimization…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Yukun Zhao , Lingyong Yan , Zhenyang Li , Shuaiqiang Wang , Zhumin Chen , Zhaochun Ren , Dawei Yin

Continual learning in large language models (LLMs) typically encounters the critical challenge of catastrophic forgetting, where previously acquired knowledge deteriorates upon exposure to new data. While techniques like replay buffers and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-25 Sneh Pillai

Catastrophic forgetting emerges as a critical challenge when fine-tuning multi-modal large language models (MLLMs), where improving performance on unseen tasks often leads to a significant performance drop on the original tasks. This paper…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Didi Zhu , Zhongyi Sun , Zexi Li , Tao Shen , Ke Yan , Shouhong Ding , Kun Kuang , Chao Wu

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

Representation forgetting refers to the drift of contextualized representations during continual training. Intuitively, the representation forgetting can influence the general knowledge stored in pre-trained language models (LMs), but the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-11 Yun Luo , Zhen Yang , Xuefeng Bai , Fandong Meng , Jie Zhou , Yue Zhang

Continual learning (CL) refers to the ability to continually learn over time by accommodating new knowledge while retaining previously learned experience. While this concept is inherent in human learning, current machine learning methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-15 Anna Vettoruzzo , Joaquin Vanschoren , Mohamed-Rafik Bouguelia , Thorsteinn Rögnvaldsson

Continual learning tries to learn new tasks without forgetting previously learned ones. In reality, most of the existing artificial neural network(ANN) models fail, while humans do the same by remembering previous works throughout their…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-05-18 Subhankar Ghosh

Modern machine learning models are deployed in diverse, non-stationary environments where they must continually adapt to new tasks and evolving knowledge. Continual fine-tuning and in-context learning are costly and brittle, whereas neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Max S. Bennett , Thomas P. Zollo , Richard Zemel

We study the right to be forgotten (GDPR Art. 17) for large language models and frame unlearning as a reproducible systems problem. Our approach treats training as a deterministic program and logs a minimal per-microbatch record (ordered ID…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Abdullah X

Catastrophic forgetting - the tendency of neural networks to forget previously learned data when learning new information - remains a central challenge in continual learning. In this work, we adopt a behavioral approach, observing a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Guy Hacohen , Tinne Tuytelaars