arXiv Machine Learning

Mechanistic Analysis of Catastrophic Forgetting in Large Language Models During Continual Fine-tuning

arXiv:2601. 18699v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Sequential fine-tuning of Large Language Models (LLMs) adaptation to target tasks often triggers catastrophic forgetting, where the acquisition of novel target skills degrades ancestral capabilities.

arXiv AI
6d ago

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 Machine Learning
Jul 15

Inference-Time Machine Unlearning via Gated Activation Redirection

arXiv:2605. 12765v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models memorize vast amounts of training data, raising concerns regarding privacy, copyright infringement, and safety.

By Vin\'icius Conte Turani, Ot\'avio Parraga, Jo\~ao Vitor Boer Abitante, Kristen K. Arguello, Joana Pasquali, Ramiro N. Barros, Flavio du Pin Calmon, Christian Mattjie, Rodrigo C. Barros, Lucas S. Kupssinsk\"u