The paper demonstrates that off‑policy merging, called grafting, outperforms on‑policy self‑distillation for continual learning. Grafting learns updates on an earlier donor checkpoint, scales the update, and optionally masks sensitive directions, thereby reducing interference with existing capabilities. Across various continual learning scenarios, grafting achieves better new‑task and old‑task performance without costly on‑policy sampling.
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
arXiv:2505. 23878v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Optimizing pretraining data composition is pivotal for LLM generalization.
By Jing Ma, Chenhao Dang, Mingjie Liao
arXiv:2603.26164v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Data-centric training has emerged as a promising direction for improving large language models (LLMs) by optimizing not only model parameters...
By Hao Liang, Zhengyang Zhao, Mingrui Chen, Meiyi Qiang, Lu Ma, Rongyi Yu, Hengyi Feng, Shixuan Sun, Zimo Meng, Xiaochen Ma, Xuanlin Yang, Qifeng Cai, Ruichuan An, Bohan Zeng, Zhen Hao Wong, Chengyu Shen, Runming He, Zhaoyang Han, Yaowei Zheng, Fangcheng Fu, Conghui He, Bin Cui, Zhiyu Li, Weinan E, Wentao Zhang
arXiv:2607. 15587v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continual learning studies how deployed language models can continually acquire new tasks without expensive retraining from scratch.
By Yang Meng, Zhenya Liu, Zhuokai Zhao, Yuxin Chen
arXiv:2610. 36983v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While data curation is widely credited with improving large language model training, a basic question remains unresolved: does curation expand what a model can ultimately learn, or merely reach the same solution faster?
By Jiaxing Wang, Zicheng Zhang, Deping Xiang, Jin Xu, Yong Li, Chao Liu, Pengzhang Liu, Qixia Jiang
The article proposes treating large language model (LLM) data mixing as a classical mixture experiment, where data domains are components, token shares are proportions, and proxy-training runs serve as design points. Using sparse second‑order Scheffé response‑surface models, the authors construct model‑robust Σ‑optimal designs that efficiently identify optimal data mixtures and reveal strong interaction effects, especially between weak domains and web‑derived text. Empirical results on RegMix show that these designs recover mixture rankings while reducing proxy runs by about 25%, demonstrating that data mixing can be optimized through experimental design rather than solely prediction.
By Yicheng Mao, Hongru Du
arXiv:2606. 06712v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the transformation of autoregressive models (ARLMs) into diffusion language models (DLMs).
By Xingyu Su, Jacob Helwig, Shubham Parashar, Atharv Chagi, Lakshmi Jotsna, Degui Zhi, James Caverlee, Dileep Kalathil, Shuiwang Ji
The paper introduces LARE, a method that adjusts domain weights during large language model pretraining by reweighting losses based on running loss statistics, rather than altering data exposure. Experiments on a 1.5B model trained with 240B tokens show that LARE improves performance across five benchmarks, achieving significant gains on GSM8K (+17.06 pp) and MATH (+9.00 pp). The approach demonstrates that balancing loss scales can enhance joint capabilities without increasing domain exposure.
By Jiazheng Li, Huaqing Zhang, Jing Xu, Tianle Cai, Jingzhao Zhang
arXiv:2607. 19450v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large-scale online reinforcement learning (RL) is the predominant means of eliciting advanced abilities including long-term reasoning and agentic tool use in large language models (LLMs).
By Yunjie Chen, Xiaoxin Chen, Fang Wang
arXiv:2606. 24133v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The composition of training data, governed by the diversity of sources and their mixing strategy, is a cornerstone of Large Language Model (LLM) pre-training.
By Chenhao Dang, Jing Ma, Mingjie Liao
Data mixture selection is critical for Large Language Model pretraining. Existing methods such as RegMix select a single static mixture by fitting a regression model on small-scale proxy runs.