The paper investigates continual machine unlearning, where models must forget data over time. It identifies a fundamental issue called plasticity collapse, where successive unlearning requests cause geometric constraints that saturate parameter space, leading to two failure modes: forward failure (reduced forgetting quality) and backward failure (re‑memorization). Experiments across architectures and datasets confirm that plasticity collapse is a pervasive problem in continual unlearning.
By Yingdan Shi, Xiang Xu, Kaize Ding, Alfred O. Hero, Ren Wang
arXiv:2609.17026v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Continual learning must balance the learning of new knowledge with the retention of previously learned knowledge to incrementally learn tasks from a da...
By Yunxiang Fu, Meng Lou, Zicheng Liao, Yizhou Yu
arXiv:2607. 05609v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Continual Learning (CL) literature has long been driven by the goal of mitigating catastrophic forgetting.
By Giulia Lanzillotta, Mandana Samiei, Doina Precup, Razvan Pascanu, Claire Vernade
arXiv:2504. 01219v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Neural networks are notorious for forgetting old skills when taught new ones - a problem known as catastrophic forgetting.
By Grzegorz Rype\'s\'c
The paper argues that catastrophic forgetting and loss of plasticity alone cannot explain why naive sequential training underperforms offline joint training. It introduces data co-observation as a third factor, showing that observing training data together consistently improves performance across supervised and self-supervised settings. The study also reinterprets common continual learning methods, suggesting that memory replay’s success stems from restoring co-observation benefits rather than merely mitigating forgetting.
By Timm Hess, Abhishek Jha, Gido M. van de Ven, Tinne Tuytelaars
arXiv:2504. 13822v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The emergence of large pre-trained networks has revolutionized the AI field, unlocking new possibilities and achieving unprecedented performance.
By Eric Nuertey Coleman, Luigi Quarantiello, Ziyue Liu, Qinwen Yang, Samrat Mukherjee, Julio Hurtado, Vincenzo Lomonaco
arXiv:2606. 08013v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Catastrophic forgetting, the abrupt loss of previously acquired knowledge upon learning new information, remains the central challenge in Continual Learning.
By Emre Alyamac, Himanshu Janmeda, Shashwat Krishna, Yash Vijay
arXiv:2603. 11201v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The world is inherently dynamic, and continual learning aims to enable models to adapt to ever-evolving data streams.
By Haihua Luo, Xuming Ran, Tommi K\"arkk\"ainen, Huiyan Xue, Zhonghua Chen, Qi Xu, Fengyu Cong
arXiv:2606. 09762v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Continual training of deep neural networks under non-stationarity often leads to a progressive loss of plasticity, eventually limiting further learning.
By Andries Rosseau, Robert M\"uller, Ann Now\'e
arXiv:2608. 11690v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continual learning must absorb new tasks without erasing old ones, and replay---mixing a small buffer of past examples into current training---is among the most effective remedies for catastrophic forgetting.
By Tieliang Gong, Zhongbo Zhang, Wen Wen, Yong-Jin Liu
Continual training of deep neural networks under non-stationarity often leads to a progressive loss of plasticity, eventually limiting further learning. We relate plasticity to the empirical Neural Tangent Kernel, and identify dynamical isometry (the condition that layer-wise Jacobian singular values remain close to one) as a key mechanism for preserving plasticity in continual learning.
arXiv:2607. 07847v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly capable, the next question is how can we enable models to continually learn?
By Anne Harrington, Nayan Saxena, Michael Murphy, Anastasia Borovykh, Zeyu Yun, Sridhar Kamath, Ara Eindra Kyi, Trevor Darrell, Jitendra Malik, Yutong Bai