When Does Continual Learning Require Learning
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?
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 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:2409. 02228v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: When language models (LMs) are trained to forget (or "unlearn'') a skill, how precisely does their behavior change?
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...
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:2608. 01672v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Effective long-context modeling is not merely about retaining more of the past, but about preserving the information that may prove relevant later.
arXiv:2607. 20458v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents operating over extended dialogues accumulate vast amounts of information, yet existing memory systems either retain everything indiscriminately or apply uniform forgetting heuristics that fail to distinguish relevant from irrelevant knowledge.
arXiv:2607. 13591v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on external memory systems to accumulate experience across tasks.
arXiv:2607. 04364v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continual post-training is becoming a central paradigm for adapting vision-language models to evolving tasks.
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.
arXiv:2609.39794v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown strong promise for general-purpose robotic manipulation, yet adapting them to new tasks and domains rema...
Large Language Model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on external memory systems to accumulate experience across tasks. Yet nearly all existing approaches, from graph-structured memories to reflective insight stores, access memory through fixed, hand-designed heuristics.