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Related papers: Overcoming Forgetting in LLM Fine-Tuning with Evol…

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Evolution Strategies (ES) is a class of powerful black-box optimisation methods that are highly parallelisable and can handle non-differentiable and noisy objectives. However, na\"ive ES becomes prohibitively expensive at scale on GPUs due…

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) followed by Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a standard post-training recipe for improving Large Language Models (LLM) reasoning, but why it works remains unclear. We revisit the common claim that ``SFT memorizes,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Hangzhan Jin , Sitao Luan , Tianwei Ni , Sicheng Lyu , Guillaume Rabusseau , Reihaneh Rabbany , Doina Precup , Mohammad Hamdaqa

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) typically rely on Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) to specialize in downstream tasks, with the Cross Entropy (CE) loss being the de facto choice. However, CE maximizes the likelihood of observed data without…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Ziniu Li , Congliang Chen , Tian Xu , Zeyu Qin , Jiancong Xiao , Zhi-Quan Luo , Ruoyu Sun

Lifelong Reinforcement Learning (LRL) holds significant potential for addressing sequential tasks, but it still faces considerable challenges. A key difficulty lies in effectively preventing catastrophic forgetting and facilitating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Zhiyi Huang , Xiaohan Shan , Jianmin Li

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-09 Chen-An Li , Hung-Yi Lee

Large language models (LLMs) store vast amounts of knowledge, which often requires updates to correct factual errors, incorporate newly acquired information, or adapt model behavior. Model editing methods have emerged as efficient solutions…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Fufang Wen , Shichang Zhang

Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful method for addressing complex control problems, particularly those involving underactuated robotic systems. However, in some cases, policies may require refinement to achieve…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Marco Calì , Alberto Sinigaglia , Niccolò Turcato , Ruggero Carli , Gian Antonio Susto

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms have been successfully applied to a range of challenging control tasks. However, these methods typically suffer from three core difficulties: temporal credit assignment with sparse rewards, lack…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-30 Shauharda Khadka , Kagan Tumer

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms and evolution strategies (ES) have been applied to various tasks, showing excellent performances. These have the opposite properties, with DRL having good sample efficiency and poor stability,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-06 Kyunghyun Lee , Byeong-Uk Lee , Ukcheol Shin , In So Kweon

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is a critical step for enhancing the instruction-following capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) and adapting them to specialized domains. However, SFT often leads to a degradation of the model's general…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Fei Ding , Baiqiao Wang

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

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Zhihao Zhang , Qiaole Dong , Qi Zhang , Jun Zhao , Enyu Zhou , Zhiheng Xi , Senjie Jin , Xiaoran Fan , Yuhao Zhou , Mingqi Wu , Yanwei Fu , Tao Ji , Tao Gui , Xuanjing Huang , Kai Chen

Real-world reinforcement learning often faces environment drift, but most existing methods rely on static entropy coefficients/target entropy, causing over-exploration during stable periods and under-exploration after drift, and leaving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Tongxi Wang , Zhuoyang Xia , Xinran Chen , Shan Liu

Catastrophic forgetting remains a major challenge when fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on narrow, task-specific data, often degrading their general knowledge and reasoning abilities. We propose SA-SFT, a lightweight…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Yutao Sun , Mingshuai Chen , Tiancheng Zhao , Phillip Miao , Zilun Zhang , Haozhan Shen , Ruizhe Zhu , Jianwei Yin

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit strong general language capabilities. However, fine-tuning these models on domain-specific tasks often leads to catastrophic forgetting, where the model overwrites or loses essential knowledge acquired…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Shezheng Song , Hao Xu , Jun Ma , Shasha Li , Long Peng , Qian Wan , Xiaodong Liu , Jie Yu

Large Language Models (LLMs) suffer severe catastrophic forgetting when adapted sequentially to new tasks in a continual learning (CL) setting. Existing approaches are fundamentally limited: replay-based methods are impractical and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Shristi Das Biswas , Yue Zhang , Anwesan Pal , Radhika Bhargava , Kaushik Roy

Evolution Strategies (ES) have recently been demonstrated to be a viable alternative to reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms on a set of challenging deep RL problems, including Atari games and MuJoCo humanoid locomotion benchmarks. While…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2018-02-27 Patryk Chrabaszcz , Ilya Loshchilov , Frank Hutter

Evolution Strategy (ES) is a powerful black-box optimization technique based on the idea of natural evolution. In each of its iterations, a key step entails ranking candidate solutions based on some fitness score. For an ES method in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-22 Eshwar S R , Shishir Kolathaya , Gugan Thoppe

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) and Evolution Strategies (ESs) have surpassed human-level control in many sequential decision-making problems, yet many open challenges still exist. To get insights into the strengths and weaknesses of DRL…