The paper investigates how implicit assumptions about tasks in continual learning affect reported performance metrics. It distinguishes between the underlying data, the partitioning of that data into tasks, and the learner’s experience, showing that different granularities, orders, and similarity structures can lead to markedly different outcomes. The authors use controlled teacher–student experiments to illustrate these effects and review existing benchmarks to assess which properties are explicitly stated.
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?
The paper introduces an algorithmic stability framework to analyze catastrophic forgetting in continual learning using SGD, without assuming a specific model architecture. It decomposes forgetting into intra‑task and cross‑task generalization gaps plus empirical forgetting, and derives bounds for different learning‑rate schedules. Experiments on Split CIFAR‑100 and Split MiniImageNet illustrate the theoretical insights.
arXiv:2609.06986v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language models may need to internalize information that arrives over time and retain it through many subsequent updates. To study this challenge, we i...
arXiv:2606. 20431v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continual learning (CL) systems often forget previously acquired knowledge, yet the mechanisms driving forgetting remain hard to isolate in practice because real datasets entangle many factors.
arXiv:2404.07729v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Continual learning (CL) evaluates adaptability in learning solutions to retain knowledge. Our research addresses the challenge of catastrophic forg...
The paper investigates time‑incremental continued pretraining (CPT) of large language models using web‑scale data that overlaps across snapshots. Across six open‑weight models, CPT improves factual recall without catastrophic forgetting, while the cost is negligible and data quality outweighs quantity. The study identifies optimal learning rates, shows LoRA can match full CPT, and demonstrates that CPT gains transfer to fine‑tuned models.
arXiv:2610.10379v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continual learning requires models to adapt to new domains and new classes while retaining prior knowledge. Many existing methods rely on continued opt...
arXiv:2604. 21927v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Continual learning (CL) studies how models acquire tasks sequentially while retaining previously learned knowledge.
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.
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.
arXiv:2609.24646v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy self-distillation fine-tuning (SDFT) learns new skills from demonstrations while reducing forgetting, but it always distils toward the full d...
The paper investigates how language models can aid their own continual learning by generating replay data and selecting preservation targets. By organizing task descriptions into Task Banks, the authors show that replay generated by frozen models reduces forgetting on tasks outside the bank and that informed selection of replay targets can improve retention. The study demonstrates that models can support broader self‑preservation, especially when larger models are used, and that replacing new‑task examples with replay can enhance preservation under a fixed example budget.