The paper identifies functionally specialized subnetworks in large language models using gradient‑attribution profiling, revealing that these subnetworks have minimal overlap. It introduces CiMEO, a continual learning framework that routes each training example to its corresponding subnetwork, limiting updates to selected parameters and optimizer states. On 1.4 million sequential instructions across five generative benchmarks, CiMEO outperforms other methods while reducing catastrophic forgetting and preserving pre‑trained representations.
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:2603. 12658v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continual learning (CL) has emerged as a pivotal paradigm to enable large language models (LLMs) to dynamically adapt to evolving knowledge and sequential tasks while mitigating catastrophic forgetting, a critical limitation of the static pre-training paradigm inherent to modern LLMs.
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.
arXiv:2605. 05285v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) often suffer from catastrophic forgetting in continual learning: after learning new tasks sequentially, they perform worse on earlier tasks.
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.
arXiv:2607. 26523v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce CMP (Cognitive Memory Primitive), a continual-learning architecture that repre?
arXiv:2606. 24007v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Continual learning remains a major challenge for modern deep networks, partly because commonly used optimizers lack inherent mechanisms for continual adaptation.
The paper introduces Evolving Functional REpertoires (EFRE), a method that replaces a single prompt with a dynamic set of functions to enable large language models to learn new tasks sequentially without forgetting. EFRE refines existing functions when updates are compatible and creates new ones when updates conflict, thereby mitigating catastrophic forgetting and overfitting. Experiments on a three‑task continual‑learning stream show EFRE outperforms GRPO by 7.50 percentage points and reduces performance drop on a subsequent task by only 1.56 percentage points compared to base prompt optimization.
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:2607. 23837v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models generalize well to individual tasks but lack an inherent mechanism for learning them sequentially, leading to catastrophic forgetting.
arXiv:2607. 22556v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continual learning (CL) is essential for small language models (SLMs) to adapt to evolving real-world needs in resource-constrained deployments.
arXiv:2605. 20247v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Catastrophic forgetting remains a major obstacle to continual learning in large language models (LLMs) and vision--language models (VLMs).