The loss of plasticity - the ability of a network to learn new information after having already learned older information - is a fundamental challenge in creating artificial neural networks capable of continual learning. Although this phenomenon has been known for decades, it has mostly been studied in older, relatively small architectures and rarely in natural-language domains.
arXiv:2606. 24998v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language models are running out of high-quality training data, and even aggressively deduplicated corpora retain some amount of repetition.
By Jessica Chudnovsky, Joshua Kazdan, Noam Levi, Rylan Schaeffer, Yegor Denisov-Blanch, Bo He, Mehmet Donmez, Sanmi Koyejo, David Donoho
arXiv:2409. 02228v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: When language models (LMs) are trained to forget (or "unlearn'') a skill, how precisely does their behavior change?
By Eric Zhang, Leshem Choshen, Jacob Andreas
arXiv:2607. 14112v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are evaluated as though perfect reliability is achievable for any task given sufficient scale.
By Subhabrata Majumdar
arXiv:2512. 18934v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Catastrophic forgetting poses a fundamental challenge in continual learning, particularly when models are quantized for deployment efficiency.
By Michael S. Zhang, Rishi A. Ruia, Arnav Kewalram, Saathvik Dharmapuram, Utkarsh Sharma, Kevin Zhu
arXiv:2608. 01475v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural networks that can grow or both grow and shrink during learning, referred to as growing neural networks and elastic neural networks, respectively, have recently been explored in offline continual learning with a particular focus on catastrophic forgetting.
By Jeong Min Kong, Richard S. Sutton
arXiv:2602. 09234v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continual learning has become a trending topic in machine learning.
By Tianhui Liu, Lili Mou
arXiv:2605. 29548v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Larger models learn tasks smaller models do not.
By Jing Huang, Daniel Wurgaft, Rachit Bansal, Laura Ruis, Naomi Saphra, David Alvarez-Melis, Andrew Kyle Lampinen, Christopher Potts, Ekdeep Singh Lubana
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.
By Hongyang Chen, Zhongwu Sun, Hongfei Ye, Kunchi Li, Xuemin Lin
arXiv:2606. 06888v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Classical scaling laws for language model pretraining balance model size against training dataset size under a fixed compute budget, assuming abundant data and a single pass over the corpus.
By Zhiwei Xu, Shihao Wu, Hanseul Cho, Wei Hu, Yixin Wang
arXiv:2606. 16256v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Continual learning for pre-trained vision-language models requires balancing three competing objectives: retaining pre-trained knowledge, preserving knowledge from a sequence of learned tasks, and maintaining the plasticity to acquire new knowledge.
By Mao-Lin Luo, Yi-Lin Zhang, Zi-Hao Zhou, Yankun Hong, Xialiang Tong, Mingxuan Yuan, Tong Wei, Min-Ling Zhang
arXiv:2607. 13432v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Plasticity -- a neural network's ability to adapt to new tasks -- is critical for continual and transfer learning.
By Jiaxuan Cheng