arXiv Machine Learning

Fisher-Guided Submodular Data Selection for Continual Pre-Training of Large Language Models

The paper introduces a Fisher-guided submodular data selection method for continual pre‑training of large language models, addressing the forgetting problem that arises when a target‑domain corpus overwrites pretrained knowledge. By decomposing candidate gradients into anchor and frontier components and optimizing a log‑determinant submodular objective, the method selects data that both improves target‑domain performance and limits forgetting. Experiments on TinyLlama‑1.1B and Llama‑3.1‑8B show that the selector achieves superior adaptation and forgetting control while using ten times fewer tokens than traditional replay strategies.

arXiv AI
Sep 28

Estimating and Orthogonalizing Unknown Pre-training Gradients for Continual Fine-tuning of Large Language Models

The paper introduces EoupCT, a framework that estimates and orthogonalizes unknown pre‑training gradients to mitigate catastrophic forgetting during continual fine‑tuning of large language models. It generates pseudo data most susceptible to forgetting using a learnable soft prompt with Gumbel‑Softmax, then jointly optimizes model parameters and the prompt via a first‑order Pareto optimizer to enforce orthogonality between new task updates and the estimated gradients. Experiments on multiple LLMs show that EoupCT preserves both task‑specific performance and the models’ inherent general‑purpose knowledge.

By Bing Wang, Changchun Li, Xin-Qiang Cai, Lin Yuanbo Wu, Ximing Li, Gang Niu, Masashi Sugiyama
arXiv Statistics ML
Oct 2

ChainLoRA: Geometry-Preserving Task Vector Merging for Continual Learning in LLMs

ChainLoRA is a replay‑free continual learning framework for large language models that merges task vectors while preserving geometry. It uses chain‑updated training with a one‑sided orthogonality proxy to keep historical state and regularization overhead constant, and applies post‑stream adaptive SVD merging with Procrustes adaptation to separate shared and task‑specific components. Experiments demonstrate state‑of‑the‑art performance on Large and SuperNI benchmarks and competitive results on Standard CL, approaching the scores of replay‑based methods.

By Hang Yin, Haozhe Wang, Yuhua Luo, Zhangqi Pan, Xiaoxing Wang, Junchi Yan
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 28

Unifying Detection and Adaptation in Task-Free Continual Learning

The paper introduces FiUni, a Fisher-guided unified framework that performs batch-level task detection and parameter-efficient continual adaptation for large language models. By exploiting orthogonality in the Fisher information matrix’s Kronecker-Factored Approximate Curvature subspaces, FiUni constructs frozen subspaces to guide low-rank adaptation and matches incoming batch windows to historical subspaces. This approach allows the model to decide whether to reuse, expand, or create new subspaces, balancing knowledge sharing and task isolation while achieving competitive performance with fewer trainable parameters.

By Dezheng Han, Anbang Zhang, Zhihao Zhu, Shuaishuai Guo